
Class __X3 JJ 4- 

Book_ ■ 1 J 







Copyright N°_ 



CfiBOUGHI BSPOSJE 




Stigmas. — Last publ shed record of this inheritance was m 
the XII century, the stigmas upon the person of Saint Francis 
of Assizi, Italy. There are on my body the same marks, in 
the locations that the Roman cross marks at its cruel execu- 
tions. A scabby sore is on my right breast, near the nipple 
— always open. On the back of each hand, in the center, are 
breaking sores; on the inside of each hand are gristly lumps; 
on my back, and opposite the front or opening sore, is a lump 
larger than an egg, resembling a fatty tumor ,at the left side 
of and near the backbone. In line between the front and 
rear sores my bowels have always felt and acted as partially 
paralyzed. Feet not pierced ; the shinbone has skin discolored. 

Wm. Taylor, Age 83. 



br> 



£ 



^P^ 



Copyright, 1922 

by 

Wm, Taylor 



©CI.A690059 

OCT -2 '22 



PREFACE 

In a measure, extent of thoughts with us is very 
limited. Blundering is the name to be applied for 
those who defining for the common sense are slack. 
"I thought" means very little. Artemas Ward lec- 
turing the spendthrift said, "It would be money in 
your pocket if you'd never been born !" 

When earliest of mankind selected one only of the 
polarities of being, the male, as leader, as god or chief, 
a costly mistake was made; it made the tyrant, the 
slave-driver, the aristocrat. This blunder made War. 

Our United States had added to its formation, one 
state inclusive, Pennsylvania, that had the humble peo- 
ple called Quakers, who would not call any man 
master; and no woman of this sect (formed in Eng- 
land) had for husband a master. The keynote with 
them was Equality. This feature in the population is 
bound to grow, so today we have a free and enlight- 
ened country, and it stands foremost of all the nations 
of earth. No nation, says Lincoln, (of Quaker de- 
scent), can endure, half slave and half free. He might 
have added, no true marriage is made half slave and 
half free. Want of thought is a bad basis, if you 
ever want to care for any creature we call domestic 
animal; you must give it soul equality, as you best 
understand freedom in life. 

All religion was founded upon the autocratic basis 
of having God or gods to rule. "The kingdom of 
God is within you," so there is no truth in slavery if 
life with both predominate — the positive and negative 
polarities. Franklin and Edison in curbing the elec- 



PREFACE 

trie fluid, very sensibly used both the positive and 
negative, in other terms, he and she. Either element 
to act alone is unthinkable. 

This belief is that upon which I base the rebirth 
theory, advocated in this work. 

If "no more war," we must have no more gods of 
the nations, conquerors. 

As mistakes occur in all early life, so recorded in 
bibles and scriptures for the less enlightened, we 
should strive to turn ahead to the known principles of 
that great Hebrew prophet, Jesus — who was the first 
to startle the world for higher principles in mankind. 
Plato, the Grecian philosopher advocated also for peo- 
ples of enlightened states to follow his teachings in 
The Republic. 

No human records are long kept. Palmyra of the 
ancients had a throng in life. The Grecian unknown 
god and the others are not now named. But the 
despised slave on the path, sings, "Carry me back to 
old Virginia," meaning to his old home. An equally 
lasting thing is the stigma, a flesh mark that lasts 
through all Christian times. So books and creeds — 
kept alive in only the mind's eye, the soul. Jehovah 
was a big name long ago, yet is passing with idolatries 
and scriptures. Cain killing Abel was a soul offense, 
to last as murder may last. The coming Age of Com- 
passion may glimpse that promised Age of Heaven! 



Physical Life and Higher Light 

BOOK ONE 

This is an age of Change. The past, we hope, ends 
the long era of wars, and for the first time in modern 
history peace conferences of the nations have produced 
general rejoicing. 

"War is Hell," was an expression of General Sher- 
man, in 1865. As the Great Prophet, Jesus, 2000 
years ago, based His work upon peace hopes — then so 
unpromising, let the prayers, the hopes ever since, of 
countless millions of peoples everywhere, be of ac- 
count. Prayers for peace are heard and may be an- 
swered from on High! Very few with love for our 
humanity but can incline to join a general chorus — 
"May the Prince of Peace be born again — to meet less 
brutality and greater general intelligence." 

There is no place like home. Oldest of our Chris- 
tian sects, and we have many, worship the mother, as 
is proper for every one of us. As to the father, Jesus, 
the Divine One, recognized this as highest — in names 
— Our Father. 

We of to-day mix the clean with the unclean, the 
man of blood, soldier, thief, conqueror, with the right- 
eous, the divine. As Adam was scourged, driven out 
of the Garden of God, so we must drive the unclean 
out of our society, or submit to a weaker polarity of 
existence. 

The kingdom of God, Jesus said, was always within 
us — whatever use you may make of a Creator and 
Preserver. If the starters of religions or governments 



8 Physical Life 

have failed to point out this kingdom, they made 
calamities and failures — this even down to the lowest 
savage tribes on earth. Gentlemen are reckoned our 
highest type of enlightenment, their failure in duty 
distressing and calamitous. Talk means little to idol 
worshippers, more than mere priestly formality, so 
remnant of this worship is too prevalent. Jesus was 
not the graven image to bow to, for that little we know 
of His teachings is as real for us as is the nation's 
government. 

Beauty— a living presence of the Earth, 
Surpassing the most fair ideal forms 
Which craft or delicate spirits hath composed 
From Earth's materials, waits upon my steps: 
Pitches her tents before me as I move. 
An hourly neighbor, Paradise, and groves 
Elysian, Fortunate Fields — like those of old 
Sought in the Atlantic Main, why should they be 
A history only of departed things, 
Or a mere fiction of what never was? 
For the discerning intellect of man, 
When wedded to this goodly universe 
In love and holy passion, shall find these 
A simple produce of the common day. * * * 
Such grateful haunts for growing, if I oft 
Must turn elsewhere — to travel near the tribes 
And fellowships of men, and see ill sights, 
Maddening passions mutually inflamed ; * * * 
Descend, prophetic Spirit! that inspirest 
The human soul of universal earth, 
Dreaming on things to come : and dost possess 
A metropolitan temple in the hearts 
Of mighty poets; upon me bestow 
A gift of genuine insight, that my song 
With star-like virtue in its place may shine ! 
Shedding benignnant influence, — and secure 
Itself from all malevolent effect. 

— Wordsworth. 

The first great reformer was Jesus of Jerusalem. 
But the Holy Land fanatics murdered Him. He came, 



And Higher Light 9 

as the pious said, eating and drinking with the publi- 
cans and sinners, and the church would have none of 
the New, the democratic, Testament. War lords later 
became unbearably oppressive, Rome fell, and then 
came a reaction in the French Revolution ; in England, 
a Robin Hood with his "outlaws" (the Lincoln 
Greens) to suppress the holy orders — monks, more to 
be feared than Darwin's monkeys! Governments in 
both England and France were so tyrannical that the 
people rose in their wrath and beheaded the kings of 
both countries. 

Education was accomplishing its blessed work. 
Brave spirits were throwing off both the religious and 
church-and-state tyrannies. The Trend of Liberty, 
going mostly westward, the final downfall here of 
oppression came with a Monroe Doctrine. Washing- 
ton's hatchet cut the way to free institutions on a New 
Continent, and English war lords, finally giving up 
their cause (Aristocracy), in a later day begged for 
our American sympathies when the most enlightened 
of their powers made a world war that threatened all 
Europe. 

A better educated Church, and less inclined to be 
aristocratic and more content under the mild govern- 
ment of the Lamb of God, is now becoming of real 
use to the people. A better understanding of the 
Blessed Book begins to guide all alike. Formerly the 
Bible was a Thing to be worshipped. 

Two authors, Virgil and Ovid, have references to 
Lethe and the descent into Hades, how the souls were 
there made ready for reincarnation and there assemble 
on the marge of the water of life, in order that they 



10 Physical Life 

may partake, and then forget their past life, thence 
returning to the physical plane. Christians and peo- 
ples of other religions have faith that they will enjoy 
an after-existence — and especially with those in or 
near the Old Home. It would be a senseless thing to 
combat such a hope. Jesus upheld, I think, such a 
heavenly vision — beauties of the earth, reunion of the 
risen; "a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without 
the Father's notice." "Heaven," he said, "was a place 
of many mansions," such as we have — the place near 
home upon the earth. 

A CREED 
By John Masefield 

I hold that when a person dies 

His soul returns again to earth ; 
Arrayed in some new flesh-disguise, 

Another mother gives him birth. 
With sturdier limbs and brighter brain 
The old soul takes the roads again. 

Such is my own belief and trust; 

This hand, this hand that holds the pen, 
Has many a hundred times been dust 

And turned, as dust, to dust again ; 
These eyes of mine have blinked and shone 
In Thebes, in Troy, in Babylon. 

All that I rightly think or do, 

Or make, or spoil, or bless, or blast, 

Is curse or blessing justly due 
For sloth or effort in the past. 

My life's a statement of the sum 

Of vice indulged, or overcome. 

And as I wander on the roads 

I shall be helped and healed and blessed ; 

Dear words shall cheer and be as goads 
To urge to heights before unguessed. 

My road shall be the road I made : 

All that I gave shall be repaid. 



And Higher Light 11 

So shall I fight, so shall I tread, 

In this long war beneath the stars ; 
So shall a glory wreathe my head, 

So shall I faint and show the scars, 
Until this case, this clogging mold, 
Be smithied all to kingly gold. 

In the chapters of this little work a stigmatized 
scribbler arises to advocate a very old doctrine or idea, 
"Rebirth," expecting all the souls of all the living 
creatures here on earth to be reborn countless times, 
and be back on earth, until all mankind will attain that 
perfection to at last be able to abide in harmony in 
that ever yearned for place or condition where a 
heaven in reality is attained — with no more of the dis- 
cords of the good and bad of life to make a Lamb of 
God other than an Elder Brother. "Who told thee 
that thou wert naked?" Adam was free to say things 
not true, possibly, about Eve, and drew the long-bow, 
as the saying is in our language; also he accused a 
hypnotist, a snake, for making things worse. This 
style of lying seemed to be at the very beginning of 
our race. 

As wise men have ever affirmed, the earth when 
fitted for life and later for mankind, was provided 
with sustenance, and for homes — a state of felicity 
highest of all. Soul and life seem synonymously one 
element, the only other materiality. 

Larger forms, with the brain dominating, have the 
long-time hibernation, death we call it, while the 
underworld, so called in Grecian literature, hath the 
Lethean forgetfulness of the past; yet the feebler 
worm, locust, etc., will be buried alive in the earth to 
pass the period and very briefly, it seems, to stay 
above the little while in sunlight and active life. 



12 Physical Life 

"The March" from "Saul," is remembrancer for all 
of the Great Adventure death, — from Incarnation to 
Spirit. Bathing in the Lake of Lethe for purification, 
then the preparation for and passing the gate of life 
again. 

Dimly in infancy thy world will appear with that 
early Hebraic sign in a church, as the Command- 
ments — partly unfitted for the present age. "Thou 
shalt have no other gods before Me. Correct; but yet 
in the prayer, another reads, "Lead us not into 
temptation but deliver us from evil." Children in this 
age would not make this balk. 

Our American poet Whitman says, personifying his 
soul's path through the reincarnations : "O vapors, I 
think I have risen with you, and moved away to dis- 
tant continents and fallen down there, for reasons; I 
think I have blown with you, O winds; O waters I 
have fingered every shore with you. All forces have 
been steadily employed to complete and delight me. 
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul. Hands 
of the sisters, Death and Night, incessantly softly 
wash me." 

Eve, the submissive, the good, has been lied about 
or enslaved all through the years. It is plainly to be 
seen she does not tempt Adam to be over-indulgent 
in use of drugged liquors, tobacco and other poisons. 
The root of woman's nature is to love and cherish, 
even the lowest of females in animal kind have this 
instinct springing from motherhood. 

There is much of old Adam even in the churches, 
as you may start to cut out dead wood from pulpit 
and amen corner to the rear benches (for poor and 



And Higher Light 13 

the niggers). Have these latter a shed for shelter in 
heaven ? 

You hear much from the meek, owlish, well-dressed 
priest (some in gold-spangled garments) about his 
want of funds — a money changer. The higher "calls" 
— they are not in the catalogue with Jesus, — are a 
source of great interest among God's agents or minis- 
ters today. And mere loafers in the house of God 
have in our free country, that ignores church entangle- 
ments, all kinds of business and other callings at high 
salaries, for the asking. Unlike the union that Adam 
belongs to (churchly) our good government offers 
equal opportunities for women. 

Costly bible institutes for education surely prepare 
the student for usefulness and keeps him away from 
low life and beggary. Receiving useful knowledge, 
any young person of brains may go up to the highest 
rung in life. Only indolence or worse can keep any 
away from the true Path and away from that Levitism 
abhored by Jesus, and of the still lower grade of 
money changers in the temple. 

A scientist as previously quoted says that smallest 
of matter still emits rays. This is equivalent to that 
saying of Jesus of the spiritual inhering in all life — 
the kingdom of God being within you. If you start a 
fire in any spot where a fire may spread, it will enlarge 
from heat into greater flames. An old saying, that 
the world will be burned — or we will have another 
flood — the polar opposition from fire. Words of the 
prophet are a true saying, if extended to spirit and 
matter being intermingled; so reincarnation is in a 
way natural. 



14 Physical Life 

Milton, in grandest of poems, hints that the high- 
est heaven may be encroached upon by the lowest, 
Apolleon. Defeated above, the devil — darkness — 
sought the light in mankind. In other words the 
Christ permitted the old boy to get a lodgment; but 
we are of the godly, — yet — beware ! 

Adam lied when he said he walked with the true 
God in the cool of the evening; then he whispered to 
the Highest that Eve had tempted him, and he did 
eat (some person's chicken of woman's excellent 
cooking), the blasted snake-fruit! 

I have marks on my body called stigmas, that mark 
infrequent intervals in man's history to account for 
the last 2,000 years of the struggle to escape savagery 
of the Roman period. This sign, marks of that Age 
of Tyranny from which the gentle Jesus died in many 
hours of his agony on the cross. That great New 
England author, Hawthorne, dared to raise his voice 
against fanaticism. His heroine was branded by pub- 
lic authority of Puritan religionists, and she died bear- 
ing the cursed mark on her breast. And scores of 
so-called witches (earliest of Christians) were put to 
death in this land of the free. Even in our day the 
citizens of all governments dare not risk a vote to pub- 
licly declare if wars shall cease ! Two thousand years 
ago a preacher was abroad asking for peace and com- 
passion. Even Lincoln says of majorities, "God must 
love the poor, He made so many of them." People 
of old were satisfied(?) to be called publicans and 
sinners. To torture and kill the great preacher, Jesus, 
a pact was made between Power — Rome, and Religion, 



And Higher Light 15 

such as it was ; a judge, however, declaring, "I find no 
fault in this man Jesus. 

Dante : 

In this their order diversely, some more 

Some less approaching to their primal source. 

Thus they to different havens are moved on 

Through the vast sea of being, and each one 

With instinct given, that bears it in its course; 

This to the lunar sphere directs the fire, 

This prompts the hearts of mortal animals, 

This the brute earth together knits, and binds. 

Nor only creatures void of intellect, 

Are aimed at by this bow ; but even those 

That have intelligence and love are pierced. 

That Providence, that so well orders all, 

With her own Light makes ever calm the heaven, 

In which the substance — that hath greatest speed, 

Is turned. And thither now as to our seat 

Predestined, we are carried by the force 

Of that strong cord, that never loses dart 

But at fair aim and glad. Yet is it true 

That as ofttimes but ill accords the form 

To the design of Art through sluggishness 

Of unreplying matter, so this course 

Is sometimes quitted by the creature, who 

Hath power, directed thus, to bend elsewhere — 

As from a cloud the fire is seen to fall 

From its original impulse warped to earth, 

By vicious fondness. Thou no more admire 

Thy soaring (if I rightly deem) than lapse 

Of torrent downwards from a mountain's height. 

There would in thee for wonder be more cause, 

If, free of hindrance, thou hadst fixed thyself 

Below, like fire in moving on the earth. 

From Dante's Pergatory, I pass along to his Para- 
dise — vision of a returned soul upon earth: 

That Lethe's water hath not hid it from him. 
That oft the memory 'reaves, perchance hath made 
His mind's eye dark. But lo ! where Ennoe flows ! 
Lead hither; an as thou art want, revive 
His fainting virtue. . . . 

Then Reader, might I sing, though but in part, 
That beverage, with whose sweetness I had ne'er 
Been sated. But since all the leaves are full. 



16 Physical Life 

Appointed for this second strain, mine art 
With warning bridle checks me. I returned 
From the most holy wave, regenerate. 
Even as new plants, renewed with foliage new, 
Pure and made apt for mounting to the stars. 

And this is an age for us mortals to rise in airplane 
nights surely! The babe, sated with that beverage, 
the mother's milk, 

Gazing as never eagle fixed his ken, 

As from a first a second beam is wont 

To issue, and reflected upwards rise, 

E'en as a pilgrim bent on his return. 

So with her (soul's) act, that through the eyesight passed 

Into my fancy, mine was formed; and straight 

Beyond our mortal wont, I fixed mine eyes 

Upon the sun. Much is allowed us There 

That Here exceeds our power; thanks to the place 

Made for the dwelling of the human kind. . . . 

And suddenly upon the day appeared 

A day new risen, as He who hath the power 

Had with another sun (soul) bedecked the sky. 

In the last analysis of character, the system called 
reincarnation has no weak spots, not in smallest of 
the spirits.. Souls that are for earth, we may say, all 
generations, are as to the smallest forms — making 
growth, making changes to suit the condition as to 
future heat and cold, for our earth itself has soul and 
body. Let us refer to all animal life, that we know 
grows in shape and fineness to suit the later conditions. 
Take the forms so familiar to us, the horse, in fact 
all domestic animals. Then the earth's pets (butter- 
flies, locuts, etc.), we know of their passing long years 
in the "underworld," to appear for a brief spell in 
full sunlight, almost momentarily to enjoy existence, 
then as happily sings the locust, after the egg-laying, 
seeks again the darkness that fits its longer term of 
existence. 



And Higher Light 17 

Our Creator has ways past finding out. Fitted are 
the two polarities of being as needed. We wonder 
why such as the fleas, as robbers of human blood, or 
as the bigger torments, human criminals, are needed 
for life's purposes. But a heaven can be fuller here, 
than (imagined) above all the homes of earth, again 
grandeurs, joys and social life are beyond dreams of 
poet and artist ! 

Body and soul so intimately blended are they, that 
a healthy person knows scarcely where one touches the 
other. Traits of character are almost like the twin 
body, with its soul. We know of most remarkable 
men and women whose traits re-unitedly theirs. 
Sickly children have often the healthy after-life of 
effort and joy; some of these, poets and philosophers, 
caused their mothers often to wonder as of a gift from 
God, knowing how the little ones thrive. 

We have amongst us Helen Keller, whose faculties 
have been restored, trained from the inborn traits. 
And her soul now, in life and joy, is the greatest of 
puzzles. A body that was tortured, crucified, as was 
that of Jesus, leaves marks to show plainly elsewhere 
after nearly 2,000 years! These stigmas are more 
than birthmarks. 

In lower forms of the soul, the "worm" stage of 
the body, from plain and loathsome (to us) they in 
later existence give us butterflies and other of the 
most beautiful aspects in colors and forms. 

Read Franklin H. Heald's Procession of the 
Planets, scouted at or ignored as it may be by scien- 
tists ; yet in studies like Prof. Chamberlin's of Chicago, 
lately, you will find the ipse dixit of the learned ones 



18 Physical Life 

of the past entirely reversed, as to the earth's solidity. 
The sun in every system of planets must resemble, — 
as Lakes of Lethe for our souls — have material un- 
seeable to constitute the materials, for life, here on 
earth and elsewhere. New worlds are thus formed, 
so are new bodies for all the living. Heat, of the 
material kind, has wonderful properties it may be, to 
weld the two aspects, soul and body. The soul's in- 
dividual complexities, generation after generation in a 
true Path — "driven out from God," as we say, then 
reaches the sphere called Life. No two souls are just 
alike ! Even in birth of twins or triplets, as often 
happens with us, the natures are entities. 

Wise men of the East, as recorded by the shepherd 
poet watching by night his flocks, saw overhead the 
galaxy of bright stars, and also the comet westward. 
He does not make record of the other party in day- 
time, going westward looking for the foot of that 
rainbow — where gold is buried, — some of each party 
finally landed in California and other states of our 
Union. 

As to where the Wise Men found the new-born 
Christ, opinions differ ; some say in a stable, others in 
a manger. 

Soon after the cruel ending of this babe, the dom- 
inant religionists (or conquerors) and one pope re- 
mained settled in Rome, the other in Constantinople. 
Since the recent overthrow of the son of Victoria of 
England, Russia has no "religion." 

The Night and the Day. John Burroughs, my 
serene and happy friend and friend of the birds, had 
query as to the cruelty of nature — that gives us the 



And Higher Light 19 

sun by day and moon by night. The owl is not a 
solemn bird ; for you judge the creature by daylight — 
its time for sleep. See the same bird at night, wide- 
awake, at its nest, and the joys it has at home where 
love rules, and ever and ever rule it should! The 
nestlings are most joyful of living creatures and in 
this regard, with the parents unmolested, far surpass 
the proud, too often peevish, human kind. 

You will find that even at his prayers the owlish 
(in piety) takes great comfort in solemnity, many 
times, too, lacking in sincerity and saturated as we are 
with "business," the leading tone is selfishness. Go 
into thy closet with a feeling of joy, as one meeting 
a lover and true friend ; for God, as Jesus instructs, 
says, is not far off — "is within you." Do not in the 
stillness of thy closet act the part of a cringing beg- 
gar — what is truly thine will come to thee ! It is a 
poor return when communing with Spirit at all times, 
and with men sometimes, to act the part that is mean, 
of beggary acknowledged. Speak no evil of anyone. 
He knoweth all, and if acting the Good Samaritan, you 
especially as a minister of God, and among those 
"sitting in darkness," be truly and honestly helpful. 
Weak nations are almost always the victims of those 
who call themselves Christians, since the dawn of 
American history. Raising the cross surely did not 
indicate the presence of good Samaritans in such 
crowds as ruined gentle natives, hospitable and civil- 
ized as were native Peruvians and Mexicans. 

The light of life here on earth — at its withdrawal — 
is not calamity, only as respects parting from beloved 
ones awhile ; for God rules. Your soul goes marching 



20 Physical Life 

on, to later reincarnations and reunions; again with 
the awhile loved and lost you will meet in joy. 

An anxious question is asked, Will we know each 
other in the new term of life? I think so, for I have 
observed that even with horses the touch of noses is 
a conveying of intelligence one to another. We can 
have this language when it is needful, for surely we 
are not below the horse in intellect, and especially 
when love points the way. 

I surmise that the after life periods, and rebirths 
differ little as with animal natures, as all alike are 
children of earth. Being primates, the larger soul 
needs a larger circuit. Instead of groveling as little 
souls do in the underworld or elsewhere, the superior 
in intellect goes into higher elements surrounding. 
The rebirths, whithersoever, do reach earth again and 
again, via reincarnation. This is an older belief than 
our historic and recent religions. We hear of it con- 
stantly by tradition, and so handed to our Christians 
of today, — that prayer of sincerity, Jesus will be re- 
born on earth! 

I have often alluded to a Night of the Soul, nega- 
tive of life's positive — as Milton in his sublime poem 
told of the proceeding of casting out devils from 
heaven. You see, on earth the near relation of day 
and night, for creatures can not live without a re- 
newal in sleep. As Bunyan starts Christian with a 
load of sin, these ofttimes heavier than can be borne, 
yet in the renewal of pleasant rest and dreams, how 
refreshed we can open the morning, singing for joy. 
So it is, escaping a night — everlasting. 

So goes my story of life, including on the traveled 



And Higher Light 21 

road all creatures. As many die, averaging the years, 
as are born. It is unaccountable that some Christians, 
dazed by beliefs of old, cling to the sacrificial altar, 
streaming with blood, in his conceptions, he yielding 
possibly to the priestly demand ( ?) for burnt offerings 
(fried chicken) and money gifts for promised remis- 
sion for sins — believing the Compassionate One, Jesus, 
had been offered up to his Father to be put to crudest 
of deaths, a sacrifice, so to get remission of sins for 
a poor little Christian man of today, and also for his 
rewards, etc., etc.. 

Even our best scientific inquirers cannot fix on the 
functions stored in a tiny egg. The stabilizing and 
other needs, as the directing of homing pigeons, needs 
for the millions of creatures beginning life here, 
would not all be learned of highest gifts to man, in 
hundreds of rebirths. What little account could our 
Creator take of prayers of all, in all languages and to 
hear the praises round a throne, from all creation ! 

We speak of wornout New England farms; so we 
might speak of the deserts in all lands possibly. Our 
orb longer blessed and later covered with vegetation, 
and waters abounding in fish, should not show now 
any signs of decay, so early after making up of the 
same. 

Man is a poor farmer to have deserts near his "land 
of promise," or say only abandoned farms. We find 
there is no trouble with nature and her affairs. I have 
seen southern cotton lands of lazy owners, in ridges 
in the forests, unused and back in the wilds. These 
lands are thus being renovated by allowing pine trees 
to start and grow thereon. The whole earth, it is said, 



22 Physical Life 

was once covered by the flood, yet man's feebler ef- 
forts only amount to irrigation in spots ! It is the 
same always with nature and mankind. If you do not 
keep garden, radishes, carrots, chicory, and beets 
under cultivation, they go to the wilds for better care. 
It is only that we can get such as watercress, — because 
this plant is irrigated — watered by nature at her 
springs bubbling up here and there. 

How are the living creatures of the garden of God 
being cared for in general? We have failing man- 
hood propped by a fiction in marriage called "love," 
that is not Love. With airplanes, autos, etc., as pre- 
cludes any serious thinking on affairs, on long jour- 
neys, the lady passengers especially crowding in their 
best-sellers — novels, so-called, for the speeders to while 
away time perusing. A favorite command to the 
man at the wheel is, go faster. So go the idlers, pass- 
ing such small spots en route as Devilton, Deep Sea 
Port, and finally the crowd may be wrecked at the 
Point of Land lying ahead — called by the unfashion- 
able name, Hell! 

Rebirths, reunions, it seems to me, are the primal 
laws of life here and hereafter, for our spirits are to 
return to earth, as Jesus hinted, by rebirth. He said 
that except ye become as little children, you are not 
of the kingdom of heaven, of light higher than this 
life: "Be such as these little ones," for they have 
passed the Lake of Purification. 

A path for all the living, souls or carnals, is, if you 
believe in immortality — from birth until death here 
and the heavenly life you hope for. Belief should 
have no infidelic gap, being of those who die, quit of 



And Higher Light 23 

higher prospects of life here or hereafter. Let us 
hope there will be no dropping out even in thought, 
losing sight of a chain of being with no beginning or 
ending. The rolling earth has its 365 days every year 
of your life here; but the orb everlasting, above and 
beyond us, completes the great circuit of being. 

One feature of the Quaker migration to Pennsyl- 
vania to escape persecutions in England, were of the 
great number bearing distinction in the old home land. 
Of the Nottingham colony were the Lincolns, Defoes, 
Hanks and Boones ; Daniel Boone later of Kentucky, 
and Abraham Lincoln descended, as also his mother 
(Hanks), from these Quaker emigrants. A niece of 
Daniel Defoe, the London Quaker, coming to the 
colony at Nottingham, deserves peculiar mention. Her 
mother and the uncle, Daniel Defoe, thwarting her in- 
tended marriage ("out of meeting," they being of the 
Society of Friends), the girl of independent spirit sold 
herself to a sea captain to pay for a passage to the 
Delaware and was "redeemed" (by paying the money) 
by Friend Job of the Nottingham Colony. Later she 
married her purchaser's son, and a grandson of this 
marriage was Andy Job, born near the Friends' brick 
meeting house, Maryland. The strange character of 
Andy Job was a few years ago written up for and 
published in Scribner's Monthly, by Mary Ireland, and 
well illustrated. Andy's farm was an excellent one, 
received as inheritance. He would not admit visitors 
to his cabin — in a beautiful white oak grove on his 
lands, possibly from the fact that he wore no clothing 
except in coldest of weathers, and did all his own 
work, though owning a nice herd of cattle. In every 



24 Physical Life 

way — though not thought to be demented, he pat- 
terned his life much like that described by Daniel 
Defoe in his famous story of Robinson Crusoe. In 
this very peculiar case, no inheritance from any real 
personage is known and must be of the order of re- 
incarnation, as the forerunners, savages, were never 
known. 

I have hitherto quoted a French scientist as saying 
that all matter he has examined emits rays of light. 
There is no doubt with anyone that all things are 
under domination in Essence and Matter — a Creator 
for matter surely, the other being the spirit thereof. 

It is well known that we have wheat today from a 
few seeds found in Egyptian tombs of some early age. 
"The seed of the Kingdom" is often a quotation; and 
Jesus, the prophet, declared "the kingdom of God is 
within you." Even the little girl, when asked who 
made her, said "God made me — so high ; I growed the 
rest !" 



And Higher Light 25 



H 



Title of this book, Physical Life and Inner Light — 
light not of the sun, but of the Creator who shows in 
physical being, all that we know of such in this life. 

Speaking of seeds that endure, I am reminded of 
once attending a lecture in Yale University on the sub- 
ject of the Seat of Life here. The speaker told us of 
a few experiments he had made. He selected some 
frozen fish in market with fins and tails intact, and 
taking the fish to an unfrozen body of water, dropped 
them in. When spring came, the fish had all "thawed 
out" and were as lively as crickets ! The speaker 
owned a pond full of terrapins, etc., and taking pity 
upon an exposed one with shell fast in the ice, dug a 
hole nearby and buried the turtle below frost line. In 
the spring he found the terrapins alive and well — 
except the one he had buried ! 

This is explanation so many poor mortals make who 
can think of no entity higher than theirs. These so 
pettishly and foolishly blurt out, "There is no God!" 
A fool of the "educated" sort once told a Quaker he 
could not see — did not believe — there was a God. The 
Friend merely asked, "Has thee ever seen thy brains, 
young man? (Of course he hadn't.) Then dost thee 
know that thee has any?" 

If a distinguished scientist gives up the riddle of 
life as unsolvable, so without more ado we poor mor- 
tals must let the frost make occasional kills; in the 
case alluded to, man was to blame. Even old earth 
has spells of the bellyache (earthquakes) and worries. 



26 Physical Life 

As education and culture advance, so does the 
reverence for womankind. Inferiority in sex is not 
recognized in animals below man. Excepting we now 
have less amazons for war; even the nobles, kaisers 
and chiefs are falling into ways of the softer sex and 
plead for ending of that savagery; a co-worker with 
slavery is war. In our bible scriptures and of the 
Shinto, Buddhist and Christian beliefs, there is the 
trace of creating better evolutions. The "born of a 
virgin" is not put forward as the true miracle of pre- 
dominance. Japanese make the variant, showing 
greatest respect for both parents, yet have proper 
respect for the wife and daughters. This precludes all 
gush about beauty and its sex abuses. 

And He rested on the seventh day, for tiresome is 
the work of creation. That is to say, putting the cart 
before the horse, for it is not likely man could have 
invented an almanac before there was call for such a 
book — as I remember away back, our old Dutch kind 
gave us rules for planting in dark or light of the moon 
and had many saws and funny crips. Think it over, 
and be of the religion of Jesus: "The Sabbath was 
made for man, not man for the Sabbath." 

"And the soul returned to me and said, thyself art 
heaven and hell," so Whitman later than Omar, on the 
seaside said, "I have fingered every shore with thee — 
my soul!" 

We can have notions, intimately in fancy, of no 
places away from earth. Traveling in Germany, a 
new country to me seemingly, and when in region 
of the Black Forest had intimations of familiar land- 
scapes there. This, as if the soul in former rebirth, 



And Higher Light 27 

I probably had been home there on that great Path of 
the Eternal. No mortals have, except they be poets, 
the fancy fit to guess at unseen things. Milton in his 
conception of a war just outside heaven's gate, — to 
subdue, as earth also experienced later, arch fiends, in- 
vaders of the devil order, — the wrong polarity, as the 
robbers, holdups, etc. 

Many besides our greatest prophet speak of the 
light within that must drive out any spiritual dark- 
ness. But if questioned about heaven and heavenly 
places — for preferments of anxious politicians and 
such, Jesus could only answer folly by folly : heaven 
is a place of many mansions. He did not proceed to 
give particulars as to taxations, and money changers — 
he had had too much trouble with the selfish followers. 

It is useless in our discussions of the golden rule, 
etc., to mention those worthies, ancient and modern, 
who gave for the thoughtful so many times, as did 
Jesus, differing only in degree, the difference between 
highest orbs — sun, moon and stars, in comparison to 
the light (as Milton said, holy light) that lighteth up 
a passage throughout the soul's path. At the first 
lesson in the primer learn that "the kingdom of God 
is within you." 

How poorly has the best of mortals made out dis- 
covering things of earth in the usual lifetime! So in 
the chances offered by our Creator to perfect ourselves 
He has given us more than one chance, by rebirth. 
But if artists leave their best work, soon time ruins 
the colors, as no pigments can be everlasting. To make 
their landscapes near the nature models must require 
artists to guess at the transitory, the vanishings with 



28 Physical Life 

time. Curious curves over the picture to blot out 
vision of shades very transitory — clouds, streams, and 
decay in all mountain grandeurs in the pictures. In 
reincarnation we can secure features of Nature in 
longer decay periods. Our "night time away from 
Nature" refreshes us, and in each life time can with 
Milton's grand apostrophe, "Hail, Holy Light, off- 
spring of heaven !" A new heaven, and a new earth — 
or older earth. So we journey afresh through the 
Seven Ages of Man. Thus comes renewal of strength, 
of aptitude for life, that in the night of the soul gets 
still more of the higher light and more manly strength 
also on being. 

The latest kind of Bible miracles for children to 
read are those made up at a period when Cicero and 
other famous men of Rome made literature prized 
ever since. Let me cite one miracle to explain ( !) the 
life work of the world's Example in every regard : a 
story of Jesus at a jolly wedding party making good 
wine. Such a character today would be consorted with 
bootleggers and breakers of the 18th Amendment to 
our national Constitution. 

This senseless, profane charge made against our 
Savior causes all the religious murders, burning of 
martyrs alive — and destruction of true writings of the 
best of authors, — who could not believe "the entire 
Bible" as handed down. The very kind of infidelity 
that has ruined the good name of a church and has- 
tens the downfall of it. 

Then, I say, on behalf of religion, separate the sheep 
from the goats in any reverenced volume, as the Bible, 
so to keep the children of God provided with only 



And Higher Light 29 

intelligent traditions, etc., of the moral kind, touching 
all the events in the farthest past. 

A print shop and a paper mill, ill used, have brought 
to the world a new form of idolatry, that formerly was 
among stone-cutters and hewers of wood. Originating 
long before mankind had knowledge, they set up some- 
thing to call an unknown spirit; later, when language 
grew, it was called the gods. There is no excuse now 
for idolatry. 

Tradition, that tells us so much of interest about 
affairs in the ancient world, is of priceless value, a 
thousand times better in form of knowledge than 
learned in the houses of gods, priestcraft, and such 
monopolies. These have been to some extent gathered, 
and one regarding the formation of the earth life — 
then mostly amphibious, but can be studied today in 
the rings of Saturn, with more perfect telescopes, as to 
the vapors and intermingled matters. First was pos- 
sibly tradition of the flood. An ingenious story-teller 
among those who tend herds of sheep by night started, 
possibly, telling of a Noah's flood. The pious hero of 
such an age — if he now had such a reputation, would 
go to jail for sex enormities and drunkenness. He, 
Noah, and family are reported among the saved mor- 
tals, with the pairs of live creatures herded in Noah's 
tub! 

The next water story, told by some shepherd on the 
hills, was that about pious Jonah, who was swallowed 
by a whale. He had a sea voyage of three days ahead, 
free of cost, and in all that time Jonah found comfort, 
maybe, but the whale got seasick. The big fish "threw 
up" about everything loose, including the "pious ex- 



30 Physical Life 

ample" — and this hero of the Bible story landed just 
where on shore he wanted to go. Three days in a 
whale's belly, and not any sea sickness or a sea biscuit ! 

At Sunday School the pious but smart boy was 
asked to state a moral to the class. He did! "You 
cannot keep a good man (Jonah) down." 

No knowledge, even apparently trivial, says Maurice 
Thompson, can be without its place in the great chain 
of wisdom. "Art is not the whole of life, nor is mate- 
rial progress the only good. The pleasure of knowl- 
edge never embodied in painting, sculpture or poem, 
nor applied to any economic purpose, is of itself a 
mighty factor in the operations of human life." 

"Lights out" along the land, 

"Lights out" upon the sea. 

The night must put her hiding hand 

Out with the tranquil lights, 

Out with the lights that burn 

For love and law and human rights ! 

Set back the clock a thousand years : 

All they have gained now disappears, 

And the dark ages suddenly return. 

You that let loose wild death, 
And terror in the night — 
God grant you draw no quiet breath, 
Until the madness you began 
Is ended, and long-suffering man, 
Set free from war lords, cries, "Let there be Light." 
— Henry Van Dyke. 

God is over all, and always is a truth generally 
understood. Another quotation is often referred to. 
Truth crushed to earth will rise again, as truth is the 
"salt of the earth." You scarcely can look for relief 
from heaven from the Highest if you have no part 
and parcel of true verity. 



And Higher Light 31 

The despised Quaker was, two hundred years ago, 
a subject of ridicule, even murder, among those who 
said he had no rights a white man is bound to respect. 
Because he had "no religion," as decided in Oxford 
University — sentiment of the elect in all aristocratical 
religious assemblies, not only in the mother country, 
but here in America among the "Puritans." Ancestors 
of our Abraham Lincoln came hither with William 
Penn, and settled in Pennsylvania. Among late can- 
didates for President of the United States were found 
four or five of the descendants of the Quakers coming 
hither, one of whom was President Harding. As is 
well known, that active world-war food provider 
abroad, another Quaker, Hoover, is now an active 
member in the U. S. Cabinet. In several colonies, in 
the time of the Revolution, the staid Quakers in poli- 
tics retired from active life because of their unwaver- 
ing peace principles. 

While Lincoln, of Quaker descent, in 1861-5 was 
President, slavery in our government of the United 
States was abolished. When the late world-war came 
to a close, our "Quaker" President called a World 
Congress together, that met in Washington, and was 
honored by delegates from European and other gov- 
ernments, all earnestly bent on securing peace for the 
world powers universally and by united effort. The 
ambitions that hitherto governed a fighting world 
should have been of "sterner stuff" — but God rules! 
Church members, when on the wrong side — the side 
of war — must be reformed, converted to the truth of 
God and wise efforts of the Greatest Prophet. Even 



32 Physical Life 

one of our best generals, in efforts to put down slav- 
ery, 1861-5, said War is Hell! 

Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate, 

As we voyage along through life; 
Tis the set of the soul that decides the goal, 

And not the calm or the strife. 

— Ella Wheeler Wilcox. 

Can there be a war in heaven — Milton says "out- 
side" — also, as asserted in the scriptures of John? My 
claim elsewhere written is that scriptures wrongly 
written have tended to abate spirituality. A general 
cry goes up among reverends in any war, just or un- 
just, to encourage fighting. The preacher fights with 
his mouth, as the saying is, harmless because gunless. 

Put up thy sword ! was a true spiritual edict of a 
Great Savior, for, as I cited of the Quaker, the man 
of peace, the world must have spirituality up to that 
point when all the rebirths to earth can be secure from 
war. The promise to the righteous of soul every- 
where, in all times. How can any with the least taint 
of combativeness rest in the final state, home for all 
the distressed of earth, except we become as little chil- 
dren, as the true assertion is. Who is keeping us out 
of heaven, the final rebirth, after so many trials, — 
except ourselves! That One Place of Peace, after buf- 
ferings through the ages, will be free from jarring 
sectarianism, mistakes between mating couples, am- 
bitions for place of power, and all other meannesses 
"flesh is heir to" will be driven from our human na- 
tures. No holy water referred to, but that baptism of 
the spirit that long has been named bathing in the spir- 
itual Lake of Lethe, where the earth-chain is severed, 
and the path starts anew! 



And Higher Light 33 

Our Christian religion was an association of war- 
ring elements from the beginning. The Lion of Judah 
associated with the Lamb of God — the democratic 
Jesus, greatest of all the Jewish prophets, yoked with 
the bearers of the Ark of the Covenant. 

The Bible says, in reference to Jesus, that in His 
early manhood He was called to discuss affairs of the 
soul with His people's doctors of divinity, similar in 
station to our worthies of the same rank, chief priests, 
doctors of divinity, etc. 

Jesus was a superior personage, evidently possessing 
great intelligence. He would have educated, converted 
His people to become an age of reason ; but as He said 
just before they secured His destruction on the Roman 
cross, "I would have gathered thee, as a hen gathereth 
her chickens under her wing, but ye would not." 

A like dissimilarity of views was noticeable while 
Saxon orthodoxy in religions was governing England 
in the 17th century. One case in point was that of 
youthful but serious George Fox, founder of Quaker- 
ism. Desiring priestly help in his religious difficulties, 
he went to a priest, as he says in his Journal, for ad- 
vice. The priest's advice to him was "Run with the 
girls, and chew tobacco." Before the imprisonments 
of George Fox ended in his death, he founded the 
Society of Friends (Quakers), to whom I make refer- 
ence elsewhere. 

Jesus, as the Bible states, after church orthodoxy 
had done its deadliest of work, cried out from the 
cross, O ye generation of vipers ! In the cruelties of 
religious persecutions under "Christians," followers of 
Jesus and others since, — drawing and quartering, 



34 Physical Life 

burning alive, — as was the case with a false "witch" 
charge against the heroic Maid of Orleans, and are 
we yet clear of persecutions, and "O ye generations 
of vipers," — as the words of a very great prophet said 
of the same savagery of the Sanhedrin. 

Very wisely our colonies forming a United States 
prohibited all union of Church and State as a form of 
our government. Wisdom of our republican form, 
under men, not the least of them to be classed as 
"vipers," can very readily be distinguished in compari- 
son from almost all other nations today, as our United 
States leads all in culture, in wealth, and in sentiments 
of freedom, education and religious toleration. 

It comes with our nature to recognize the fittest, for 
it has been a long time since devil worship. It is not 
in man to perform miracles; he may only do tricks. 
When Jesus said, Go into thy closet (for prayer) to 
have access to the Presence, He evidently meant the 
spiritual communion alone, and wordless, of course. 
"He will reward thee openly." This applies to us who 
ask — not in any free-will mockery. Your inventors 
of any manner of useful things seek this silent ap- 
proach. Could any inventor get his inspiration by 
frequenting places where are mere noise, or amusing 
antics? 

Flammarion, the star-gazer, poet and mystic, has 
issued a book of soul-searching import. I take the 
following extract from it : After admitting that spirit 
and matter are forces in unity everywhere, it says : 
Cosmic dynomism rules the worlds. Newton gave it 
the name of attraction. If there were nothing but at- 
traction in the universe the stars would form only one 



And Higher Light 35 

mass, for it would have brought them together long 
ago, in the beginning of time. There is something 
else! Vital dynomism governs all beings. In man, as 
he has evolved, psychic dynomism is constantly associ- 
ated with vital dynomism. At bottom all these dyno- 
misms are one — it is the spirit in nature, deaf and 
blind as far as we are concerned in the immaterial 
world ; and even in the instinct of animals ; unconscious 
in the majority of human works — conscious in a small 
number. Matter vanishes; the universe is an intelli- 
gent principle." 

This is as good a guess as yet proclaimed, for in 
earliest scriptures is admitted, Ye have not seen God 
at any time. 

The song of the reaper has a thought of home in 
sight; a lad on the sea will feign seasickness when it 
is homesickness. Wars on land or on sea are wreckers 
of home, and the dazed brain of a tramp comes of his 
flight from home and its innocence — his father's 
house. Lately, in the Arroyo meadow trees, I heard 
though the night joyful songs of home — a mocking 
bird's gentle singing, and knew it was for his patient, 
sitting mate. Then near me other music of a human, 
a love song for the children. Songs of this kind make 
for the beautiful and happy feelings of all the living; 
an opposite in polarity takes you afar from the tree of 
life and love. Even very gypsies will stand together 
and cherish one another through the centuries if they 
are not aquit of the song of songs they heard in deserts 
many centuries ago. The Father of Life gave the 
home for bird or beast, or man, and those reborn to 
earth, hearing the voice of God always will need not 



36 Physical Life 

be fearful of darkness, or divorce, wars, or carnage, or 
thieves, if you are fighters for the right, for home. 

President Harding, we have noted elsewhere, re- 
ceives much criticism in English quarters, because he 
doesn't know good English. Below I copy from a 
late address to students a fair specimen of the way 
this sinner uses the American language : Declaring that 
almost nothing remains secure today from the attacks 
of iconoclasts. Our President appealed to the gradu- 
ating classes of the nation's universities and colleges to 
dedicate themselves to an unselfish service in the 
preservation of civilization. 

"We look to this month's graduating classes," said 
the President, speaking at the commencement exer- 
cises of the American University, "to provide far more 
than their numerical share of leaders for the nation in 
a future not far ahead. 

"The nation must constantly be on its guard against 
the tendency to tear down established institutions 
before a plan of reconstruction had been devised. 

"After all, unsatisfactory as some earnest people 
regard the present structure of society and existing 
human relationships, a reasonably conscientious world 
has been a long time traveling far on the road toward 
as ideal conditions as it now has reached. History 
has afforded many illustrations of societies crumbling 
and going to pieces, and the process has invariably been 
attended with superlative disaster to great masses of 
humanity. 

"It is a commonplace that at this time the world 
stands on the brink of what looks very like a precipice. 
It must not be allowed to take the fatal plunge. It 



And Higher Light 37 

will not if it shall be able to summon to its leadership 
in the coming generation men and women who will 
unite a necessary measure of conservative purpose with 
an equally necessary portion of willingness to con- 
sider new expedients, to test out formulas, to apply 
the acid test even to what we have learned to believe 
is pure gold." 

In our war for the Union, and incidentally to put 
down the Southern and English aristocracy, 1861-5, 
we noted that the free press was non est inventu with 
our enemies. Comic Punch only punched as the aris- 
tocrats bid it "be funny." After the war, it was too 
serious a concern for those against Liberty to see 
much fun in anything. Elsewhere in this book an 
extract from poem by Thomas Taylor of England 
(Tom Taylor in good English), will enlighten the 
reader about English aristocratical opinions of Lin- 
coln. 

"Serene, I fold my hands and wait, 
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea ; 
I rave no more 'gainst Time or Fate, 
For lo ! my own shall come to me. 

"I stay my haste, I make delays, 
For what avails this eager pace? 
I stand amid the eternal ways, 
And what is mine shall know my face." 
— John Burroughs. 

Saddest of mortals that ever lived were friends 
probably of those who were stricken from life here 
in their early years. Surely we all would welcome 
their return. An ever-loved one in all the Christian 
centuries was Jesus of Nazareth. This primate of 
all prophets, when his young life was taken in torture 
on the cross at behest of phenatics, he despairingly 



38 Physical Life 

cried, My God, hast thou forsaken me? Best beloved 
of English poets, Keats, in his great gloom and disap- 
pointment (he died in early years of consumption) 
said, My name is writ in water! The best possibly 
of our southern bards, Dunbar, in a sad but beautiful 
poem affirmed, "I's lone and in distress." He was 
stricken by consumption when a mere youth. 

Could anyone make suggestion of a more hopeful 
theory for humanity than that in this my book. — A 
never-ending Circuit of Being, where the loved and 
lost could be restored, to gladden the generations of 
the earth-born? Precious lives of great ones, never 
forgotten ones, who could again spread comforting 
words of hope, words ever to be remembered, and 
thus to better help and cheer all generations. 

With falcon-wings have flown the two-score years 

Since here I trod the heights, yet now I gaze 

Entranced, for that blue lonliness betrays 

No age, — like some perpetual bride who bears 

Unfading wreaths of bloom, it yearly wears 

Fresh garlands woven of cerulean haze; 

These dreamy hills well loved in happier days, 

Seem even lovelier as my twilight nears. 

Tense life hath taken her relentless toll, 

For to myslf I turn, and see the truth 

Furrowed upon my brow, and in the soul 

Deep scars : Corrosive Time hath wrought the change ; 

And yet yon blue, insensate mountain range 

Defies mutation with perennial youth. * * * 

Each eve I perish on my sumptuous pyre, 
Yet every morn my bright renascence brings 
Innumerous orbs to illume the rolling earth — 
When I, at dusk, withdraw from view of men, 
But star and planet never meet my sight : 
I am that Splendor of primeval birth, 
Which flushed the dawn of Chaos, and since then 
For me — till systems crash — there is no Night. 



And Higher Light 39 

I loved the Day, but now the dark Night clings 
Close to my soul. Lo, through the evening air 
Night comes, — naked and pure — divinely fair — 
Slow floating downward on those brooding wings ! 
She is the Dove of Darkness, and she brings 
The olive, Peace, into the Tents of Care: 
Oh, let the raven mystery of her hair 
Enshroud me with occult imaginings ! 
O, Night, if thou art beautiful as this, 
Let thine arms fold me till my passing breath 
Dies into dreams wherein the Spirit rests : 
Numb me with rapture of Thy Lethean kiss. 

— Lloyd Mifflin. 

Belief, no doubt, began with the notion of failing 
power of argument or assertion. Since the Christian 
age and periods of better education, we have had less 
of Thus saith the Lord. I remember well when in 
protracted meetings for conversion, to hear in ser- 
mon and song, "Only believe and you will be saved." 

Early references can not be found in the Bible, I 
presume, of reincarnation — because there was no full 
faith in immortality. Our New Testament and else- 
where, catching the truth of a Hereafter, taught by 
the great Prophet, abounds in the spiritual concept 
entire and not of idol worship. We find a story of 
Jonah in the Jewish scriptures, that does not refer to 
the Spirit — for Jonah had merely made his temporary 
earthly domicil in the whale's belly. Theologians since 
time of the murder of Jesus have the fact, (little they 
understand it!), how education has improved — 
through belief in miracles being lost sight of — so such 
ones as that about Jesus even are out of date ; where 
he turned crystal clear water, at a wedding carousal, 
into wine! This foolish miracle was of the order of 
the Jonah story. 



40 Physical Life 

From the good work women of the societies and 
others accomplish, I may well advocate that there is 
no Supreme Spirit having male sex, and I affirm that 
without woman's help theology long ago would have 
collapsed. God, He; God, She, — seems very ridicu- 
lous except to thoughtless priests. Before the male 
supremacy here, or hereafter, had any lodgment in 
beliefs, there was in very ancient times a woman god. 

Nurse of Eternity, 

Thy bosom feeds the sun ; 
From thine eternity 

All breasts in nature run. 
To thy bright Light we turn 

All other gods to spurn ! 

Modern philosophy may require better common 
sense, to fix in our minds a fact (?) that beams of 
light have any zigzag or other unseen course from 
distant spheres, to reach us. As well say the con- 
science or higher light have a way of wabbling, so 
that you do not get your true measure! In what 
measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again, 
whether of laughter, or the sunlight, — even of pota- 
toes (?) you will require the full measure. 

As Bro. Heald relates (see Appendix) a heavenly 
body of our own system, as astronomers affirm, and 
name Asteroid, was a law-breaker among the great 
bodies of the universe, so was flung to atoms. A 
nature criminal giving us the particles attracted to 
earth called meteorites, etc. Criminals in human 
society are entitled to punishment surely in proportion 
even as a law-breaking star. Life of Lincoln was 
destroyed by one of the creatures, lower than a 
louse, who knew not any human sympathy. Very 



And Higher Light 41 

pious but mistaken people advocate forgiveness, im- 
mediate conversion, etc., so go to jails to present these 
lice, flowers! A well-known author, Thos. Taylor of 
England, in a poem on Lincoln's burial, at a time 
all friends of humanity or democracy were mourning, 
had these words of stinging reproach for the Glad- 
stones and other English aristocrats who were wish- 
ing ill of our republic. I quote opening lines : 

You lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier, 

You who with mocking pencil wont to trace — 
Broad for the self-complacent British sneer, 

His length of shambling limb, his furrow'd face, 
His giant, gnarled hands, his unkempt, bristling hair 

His gait uncouth, his bearing ill at ease, 
His lack of all we prize as debonair ; 

Of power or will to shine, of art to please. 
You whose smart pen back'd up the pencil's laugh 

Judging each step as though the way were plain ; 
Between the mourners at his head and feet, 

Say, scurrile jester, is there room for you? 

This from a talented Englishman, whom his Saxon 
friends called Tom Taylor — a despiser he was of a 
title from aristocrats. 

Get your criminals at earliest possible moment, and 
remove them from sight of innocency; or kill them, — 
for all souls passing to rebirth, then pure as babes 
again, are sure of another chance to do well. In youth 
most of us were taught by good mothers about the 
Good man and Bad man. You could have no better 
instructors to warn of opposite polarities. As educa- 
tion will augment possibly the class called drones, lit- 
tle higher than criminals, they should be treated as 
our Greatest Prophet did, with compassion ; weak and 
poor you help, the mere animal tricksters you ignore 
as being neither good nor half-good. Since Sunday 



42 Physical Life 

schools were started by educators, we have compas- 
sionate, careful lovers of youth to impart and explain 
real helpful knowledge. Jesus spent no hours I affirm 
in biblical nonentities, but his teachings were very help- 
ful. "Behold the lilies of the field." "The sparrow 
can not fall to the ground" without His notice. I 
would suggest a work like that helpful book of Cali- 
fornia Useful Plants for this state. It is full of in- 
struction, giving pleasure to brainy youth. I remem- 
ber near-childhood incident of an uncle carrying me 
to the pens outside — a new phase of active life to me. 
The compassionate Lincoln had long grief when his 
father sold his pet little pig! A truly American poet, 
Paul L. Dunbar, says: 

Da rain done hid de mountain's fo'm, 
De trees is bendin' in de sto'm, 

I's lone and in distress. 
But listen, dah's a voice I hyeah, 
A-sayin' to me, loud and cleah, 

"Lay low in de wildaness." 

Look not outwards but inwards; there are sure no 
ideas in miracles. There now is belief in the supreme 
spirit, be it Law or be it Creator. "There is no god 
but God," one may say with Mahomet, another can 
quote Jesus, another Buddha. 

The pose naturally of a tree, on any part of earth, 
points from center dark, to light of magnetic or sun 
force. What was the cult called Druidism, coming 
evidently from tree worship? Origin may be from 
fabled Adam's day of old, before the fall of man 
even — he fell from his home in the trees, to better 
himself after an age of monsters on sea and land as 
found now in our museums but articulated. Great 



And Higher Light 43 

snakes ! from Ireland, driven, as was Eve, from the 
better land of Paradise, where the Tree of Life was 
blooming, and the (forbidden) Fruit sickened Adam, 
possibly then he tried stock raising. This course of 
the Circuit of Life on earth, that fetches us time 
and again to the world (in rebirth) is traditional and 
problematical. And from pioneer days on all the con- 
tinents, the trees, the grass and the flowers should 
make us surely lovers of Nature in all its ramifications. 

And all these things seemed very glad, 
The sun, the flowers, the birds on wing 

The jolly beasts, the fury-clad 

Fat bees, the flowers, and everything. 

But gladder than them all was I, 

Who being man might gather up 
The joy of all beneath the sky, 

And add their treasures to my cup. 

And travel every shining way, 
Laugh with the world at world's delight 

Create a sphere for every day, 
And store a dream for every night. 

— John Drinkwater. 

Yale Review of late date speaks thus of an English 
woman's autobiography. She "has no sense of re- 
serve, no passion for accuracy, and no standard of 
taste, can hardly fail to write an entertaining book 
for England — and — more timidly — the United States. 
. . . It is a story after the order of Melchizedek, 
without beginning and without end. . . . She shrank 
not from exposing the secrets and sensations of life." 
A good bit of honest criticism! 



44 Physical Life 

EAST AND WEST 

Men look to the east for the dawning things, 
For the light of the rising sun ; 
But they look to the west, to the crimson west, 
For a view of the things that are done. 

For the eastward sun is a new born hope 
From the dark of the night distilled, 
But the westward sun is the sunset sun, 
The sum of a hope fulfilled. 

For there in the east they have always came - 
The cradle that gave the birth — 
To all the hopes of the hearts of men, 
To all the hopes of the earth. 

For there in the east a Christ arose, 
And there in east there gleamed 
The dearest dream and the clearest dream 
That a prophet ever dreamed. 

But into the waking west they came 

With the dream-child of the east, 

And they found the hope they had hoped of old 

A htousandfold increased. 

For there in the east we dreamed the dream 
Of the things we hoped to do, 
But here in the west, the crimson west, 
The dreams of the east came true. 

How do we get civilized and away from barbarism, 
if not through being born again? Christian belief 
as to Jesus and others whose blessed work for less 
civilized mortals, gave us clues for betterment. It has 
surely depended upon rebirth, as all our instincts point 
directly to former denizens of earth, before the print- 
ing press was thought of, or even earlier stories of 
creation were handed down. Discoverer of America 
had, as recorded, a firm instinctive faith as to new 
continent. Peoples of the East were famous naviga- 



And Higher Light 45 

tors and no doubt Columbus was under this inheritance 
from Phoenician or Greek life lived long ago. In 
Spain or among Druids were no such leading. In- 
heritance means that which inheres, aside from real 
estate affairs, for Shakespeare says, "It is to enclose 
as in a funeral monument, traditions" ; or as Raleigh 
says to have inherently. If the earth is for real estate 
owners, why is its surface so given to the waters? 

Oliver Lodge, a learned spiritualist of the true order, 
already has a vast following — many from communing 
with unseen spirits as though heaven and earth were 
one. To what region will Jesus next come : to lands 
of his former work and agonies, still in control of 
autocrats, popes, kings and Kaisers, who hated him, or 
more sensibly, to those of the loving kind, the poor 
in heart who will gladly receive him? The principles 
of equity and helpfulness that Jesus taught are in 
the very foundations of the government of the United 
States, and signs of the times point to the triumph 
of the republicanism that means equity, equality of 
rights. 

Nor shall I deem His object served, 

His end attained, His genuine strength put forth 

While only here and there a star dispels 

The darkness. . . . When the host is out 

At once to the despair of Night 

When all mankind alike is perfected — 

Equal in full-bloom powers, — then not till then, 

I say begins Man's general infancy. 

— Browning. 

Reader, did it ever occur to you that Heaven may 
be in our midst unseen? This surely would shorten 
the Circuit of Being. For ages we have had so-called 
spirit rappings, communications with unseen ones; by 



46 Physical Life 

priests, ministers, mediums, etc. We know that as God 
is spirit, no one has seen Him at any time ; time being 
a material concept. What is coming from hell or the 
devil — negative of the Great Spirit — is not known. 
Have we ever had an age of miracles? I think not, 
for Law can never lie dormant, if from God : spirit 
never sleeps. To get a better advertiser was the need 
in theology a few centuries after Jesus had been killed 
by the fanatics. Make a noise, call out the lo heres 
and lo heres; so the miracles were revamped from 
uses in barbarism of olden times. Jesus taught high- 
est philosophy. 

There is cause and effect in everything — in natural 
way of course ; so when clouds move because heat has 
to do with it, and the electrical disturbances must 
likewise be governed ; then at man's behest if anything 
must stand still in Nature [as the sun is reported, 
while a fight lasted, over the valley of Ajalon] the 
reporter may have been drinking a drop too much 
or was asleep. 

It is well known to intelligent readers that reincar- 
nation is one of man's earliest beliefs. All ancient 
writings, including the Scriptures, have frequent refer- 
ence to it — being born again. In fact, devout Chris- 
tians and of all religions down to lowest level of cul- 
ture, daily pray and act under this belief. 

In Matthew, 11:15, of our New Testament, is this: 
And from the days of John the Baptist until now, 
the kingdom of heaven — [likely was meant the Holy 
Land of the Jews] — suffereth violence — [Jewish na- 
tion, conquered by the Romans] — and men of violence 
take it by force; for all the Prophets and the Law 



And Higher Light 47 

prophesied until John. And if ye are willing to re- 
ceive it, this is Elijah [Jesus] which is to come. He 
that hath ears to hear, let him hear. * * * For John 
came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, he 
hath a devil. The Son of Man came eating and drink- 
ing, and they say, Behold a gluttonous man and a wine- 
bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners! And wis- 
dom is justified by her works." 

In Malachi, "Behold I will send you Elijah the 
prophet [by rebirth] before the great and terrible day 
of the Lord come; and he shall turn the heart of the 
fathers to the children; they to their fathers, lest I 
come and smite the earth with a curse." 

Luke 1:17, And he shall go before his face in the 
spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the 
fathers to the children, and the disobedient to walk 
in the wisdom of the just to make ready for the Lord 
a people prepared for Him. 

Matthew 17:12. And he answered and said, Elijah 
indeed cometh and shall restore all -things : but I say 
unto you, that Elijah is come already, and they 
knew him not, but did unto him whatsoever they 
listed. Even so shall the Son of Man suffer of them. 

John 1 :23. What sayest thou of thyself? He said, 
"I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness. 
Make straight the way of the Lord, as said Isaiah the 
Prophet, * * * And they asked him and said unto 
him, Why then baptized thou, if thou art not the 
Christ? John answered them saying, I baptizeth with 
water ; in the midst of you standeth one whom ye know 
not, even him that cometh after me, the latchstring 
of whose shoe I am not worthv to unloose." 



48 Physical Life 

This prophecy (or introduction) of a great prophet, 
met fulfilment, — after a great many centuries of 
wrangling. We have no guide, religious or govern- 
mental, that would govern mortals truer than the ad- 
vice vouchsafed by Jesus. I quote below from Charles 
Nordhoff's Politics for Young Americans. 

"I believe that free government is a political appli- 
cation of the Christian theory of life; that at the 
base of the republican system lies the Golden Rule; 
and that to be a good citizen of the United States one 
ought to be imbued with the spirit of Christianity, and 
to believe in and act upon the teachings of Jesus. He 
condemned self-seeking, covetousness, hypocrisy, class 
distinctions, envy, malice, undue and ignoble ambition, 
and he inculcated self-restraint, repression of the lower 
and meaner passions; love to the neighbor, content- 
ment, gentleness, regard for the rights and happiness 
of others, and respect for the law. It seems to me 
that the vices he condemned are those also which are 
dangerous to the perpetuity of republican govern- 
ment; and that the principles he inculcated may be 
properly used as tests of the merits of a political sys- 
tem or a public policy." 

A poet of the nimble fancy exclaims, "How won- 
derful is sleep, sleep and his brother death!" Just 
as are your perceptions, keen or dull, will you behold 
of the higher life, the innocent, unwordly state and 
condition of Jesus, when he says that children are of 
the spirit that will be prevalent in the Hereafter. You 
can have no Heaven without this spirit. You make 
your conceptions of hell theologically, to suit your- 
self. No one here can tell of any divisions, physically, 



And Higher Light 49 

in the Hereafter — of Heaven, Purgatory or Hell. 
These are earth-born. An eloquent but crafty 
preacher can add to his possessions in his sermon by 
references to his personal "wants," say a piano, if in 
his congregation is a rich musical instrument maker, 
by broad hints — so that "thrift may follow fawning." 
Evil will grow upon what it feeds — as a hog fattens. 
A servant is worthy of his hire, but somehow it hap- 
happens that a master's eye is worth two of his hands. 
So the hypocrite has a higher recompense (?) than 
is awarded a mere hog, or the contrary. 

How comes it that we know neither the day nor 
even the year of Jesus' birth; and only lay claim to 
December 25th because it is the Winter Solstice and 
is the birthday of an entire host of Pagan Gods, all of 
them reputed to have been born of virgins : — Crishna, 
Buddha, Mithra, Isis, Osiris, Hercules, Bacchus, 
Adonis, and dozens more? Is it all coincidence? And 
is it a mere coincidence that the rites of religion as 
practised now were, almost entirely, instituted by 
Mithra, five hundred years, approximately, before 
Jesus was born? While the doctrines of election and 
free grace, as taught by Calvinism and Arminianism, 
could never be harmonized with each other, with rea- 
son, or with the Bible, yet these two Bible doctrines 
are perfectly harmonious, seen from the standpoint of 
the plan of the ages. In view of God's glorious plans 
for the future, what must be the attitude of every 
true Christian respecting the second advent of our 
Lord Jesus Christ — the first step toward the accom- 
plishment of the long-promised and long-expected 



50 Physical Life 

blessings for the world of mankind? — Golden Age, 
April, 1921. 

While aristocracy and orthodoxy (in religion) had 
dominacy, a democratic form of government was im- 
possible. Even in our American colonies, the frenzy 
of religion became so rampant that under the Puritan 
rule, in New Haven, Conn., H. Norton, a Quaker, in 
1657, was sent to prison for preaching the Word of 
God as he understood it, and later flogged cruelly until 
citizens interfered. Then he was branded in his right 
hand with letter H (heritic) and sent back to jail till 
a heavy fine should be paid. A stranger, a Dutch- 
man, out of compassion, paid the fine. Later, Norton 
was banished from among the Puritan Elect. John 
Milton visited Gallileo in prison, in Europe, as the 
two were heretics — agreed, however, on question of 
astronomy, and had suffered for biblical non-con- 
formity. 

Lest the sorcerer entice 

With some other new device. 

Says Milton. These two were compelled by imprison- 
ment and threats of death, to keep speechless while 
inquisition ruled. 

Since the Spaniards first in America raised their re- 
ligious banner, the Cross, in their search for gold, and 
Columbus tried a trick of making, for profit, slaves 
of the Aborigines here, it seems a far cry to the real 
Christian kind of government we have now. 

I refer elsewhere to a paper in the Missionary Re- 
view of the World, written by Dr. Eleanor Taylor Cal- 
verly, formerly of York, Pa. The writer, now a resi- 
dent of Kuweit, Arabia, says : "Yes, we admit there 



And Higher Light 51 

is much cruelty among the Arabs; they are no mean 
workmen, and are brave in war — suffering silently the 
pangs of death, because death is from Allah. They 
are here a most hospitable people." 

In matters of the gods we are mostly concerned in 
the Far East. Here in America, a land of freedom, 
our spiritual, progressive, conceptions are different. 
Our form of government, republican, opposes the old 
Eastern tyrannies in any shape : our own Washington 
and lovers of freedom abroad — La Fayette, Steuben, 
Payne, — would not abide under aristocrasies in the 
eastern world, nor religions of "Thus saith the Lord." 

The trend of civilization has ever appeared west- 
ward. Our first president of the United States advised 
us to keep free from all European or other foreign 
alliances, secular or religious entanglements. 

Hindu scriptures have hope of the Prasna Upanis- 
had, 1.10, "that they who seek the Atman by austerity, 
chastity, faith and knowledge — they do not return in 
any more rebirths, — only means that they have finally 
escaped from the thralldom of reincarnations by being 
absorbed into God. Throughout the thirteen principal 
Upanishads the records of that eager quest which India 
has been pursuing through the centuries, which is 
tersely expressed in the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad 
in its first division (at 1, 3, 28) : 

"From the unreal lead me to the real, 
From the darkness lead me to the light, 
From death lead me to immortality." 

Not being an educational force, Theology is losing 
ground, and the Prince of Peace gains, in an en- 
lightened world. 



52 Physical Life 

Arabs along the Red Sea, a most hospitable people, 
are far from being free from sensuality and bigotry. 

Dr. Eleanor Taylor Calverly, graduate of Phila- 
delphia Woman's Medical College, now living at the 
Kuweit Mission in Arabia, writes a graphic paper to 
the Missionary Reviezu of the World about her neigh- 
bors. She speaks of Arabs as being very hospitable, and 
yet sensual and cruel; one house is for the "mother," 
the other is for "father's wife." There is Moham- 
medan belief in the evil eye; and children grow up 
in an atmosphere of envy, fear and hatred. "Little 
Arab sister, with sweet olive-tinted face and great 
wondering brown eyes, is a playmate of the doctor's 
little daughter. Disadvantages of Arab children are 
both spiritual and mental; yet there is something that 
is irresistible in the wide-mouthed, guileless smile of a 
baby, whether he be white, red, brown, yellow or black. 

Life in an Arab town is something very sordid. 
There is so much to make one shudder, so much to 
wring one's heart. Then there is also the monotony : 
sand, sand, sand! 

The doctor says, "Our little daughter, clad in pink 
rompers, and playing in the sand, was happy. Naima, 
our daughter's Arabic name, was asked by her play- 
mate, Hassa, 'Where are your jewels? You have 
none?' Naima shook her head. 'Oh,' cried Hassa, 
'you poor thing.' When I heard Hassa say this there 
came to me a vision of the probable future of these 
two children. I saw our little girl, in free America, 
rolling hoops and jumping rope, while Hassa was se- 
cluded and guarded within the confines of her home 
lest she be seen by men. Then I saw our little one a 



And Higher Light 53 

few years later, a sweet girl graduate; then Hassa, 14 
years of age, would be spending sleepless nights to still 
the crying of her first-born child. I saw our daughter 
walking arm in arm with comrades on the college cam- 
pus; when Hassa, a disappointed, sad-eyed woman, 
divorced, re-married, would be supplanted by a 
partner wife." 

Of all the land far-famed for goodly steeds, 

Thou com'st, O stranger, to the noblest spot. 

Colonos, glistening bright, 

Where evermore, in thickets freshly green, 

The clear-voiced nightingale 

Still haunts and pours her song, 

By purpling ivy hid. * * * 

And yet another praise is mine to sing, 

Gift of the Mighty God 

To this, our city, mother of us all, 

Her greatest, noblest boast, 

Famed for her goodly steeds, 

Famed for her bounding colts, 

Famed for her sparkling sea. 

— CEdipus at Colonos. 

Above I quote from the famous Greek author, his 
hint that a city of thy desire may be a heaven, of de- 
light, for the once and evermore denizen of earth. If 
elsewhere I refer to the "heaven-born" of Biblical 
times, the meaning must be taken as earth-born. Gods 
in the old Grecian times were said to have marriage 
with mortals. Be sure there is mistake — they have 
been of earth-birth. Even along in our history, in an 
enlightened Roman period of the New Testament, 
Jesus it was said came to earth fatherless and departed 
"in a cloud." Let us hope He Himself was free from 
trickery of the pious reporters in everything, for He 
braved a cruel death from fanatics to do unrivaled 
good for all humanity. 



54 Physical Life 

Put your ear to the ground, as the saying is, for we 
of the lowly have a hearing as well as a vision out- 
wardly and inwardly. Sleep and Death by Shelley are 
accounted of, similarly, higher than by the outward 
senses. You who have vision can find this true. After 
the death of your beloved, then beyond the human 
senses, you can in dreams be told — these latter are 
not of earth. You may dream of helping the beloved 
one still, from a cramped enclosure as earth, and then 
the heavenly smiles reward you. While mere names 
of earth mates will not recur, yet you still detect the 
object, knowing no names can reach above earthly 
condition. Good and bad, rich or poor ,are terms for 
us here. Good news of a conscience turns up now and 
then ; but finally death grips ; then Higher Light is too 
radiant. "I will repay." An eye for an eye is the 
human balance, yet the higher adjustment sure follows 
delinquency, and the stumbling over conscience of 
"Forgive ! forgive ! !" of the unworthy. Justice is sure, 
and sure does Fate "Strike once, and strikes no more." 

EVELYN HOPE 

By Robert Browning 

Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead! 

Sit and watch by her side an hour. 
That is her book-shelf, this her bed; 

She plucked that piece of geranium flower, 
Beginning to die, too, in the glass ; 

Little has yet been changed, I think : 
The shutters are shut, no light may pass 

Save two long rays through the hinges' chink. 
Sixteen years old when she died ! 

Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name ; 
It was not her time to love; besides, 

Her life had many a hope and aim, 
And now was quiet, now astir, 



And Higher Light 55 



Till God's hand beckoned unawares, — 

And the sweet white brow is all of her. 
Is it too late, then, Evelyn Hope? 

What your soul was, pure and true, 
The good stars met in your horoscope, 

Made you of spirit, fire and dew — 
And just because I was thrice as old, 

And our paths in the world diverged so wide, 
Each was naught to each, must I be told? 

We were fellow mortals, naught beside ; 
No, indeed ! for God above 

Is great to grant, as mighty to make, 
And creates the love to reward the love : 

I claim you still, for my own love's sake ! 
Delayed it may be for more lives yet, 

Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few : 
Much is to learn, much to forget, 

Ere the time be come for taking you. 
But the time will come,— at last it will, 

When Evelyn Hope, what meant (I shall say), 
In the lower earth, in the years long still, 

That body and soul so pure and gay? 
Why your hair was amber, I shall opine, 

And your mouth of your own geranium's red — 
And what you would do with me, in fine, 

In the new life come in the old one's stead. 
I have lived (I shall say), so much since then, 

Given up myself so many times, 
Gained me the gains of various men, 

Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes ; 
Yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope, 

Either I missed or itself missed me : 
And I want, and find you, Evelyn Hope ! 

What is the issue? Let us see! 
I loved you, Evelyn, all the while ! 

My heart seemed full as it could hold: 
There was place and to spare for the frank young smile, 

And the red young month and the hair's young gold. 
So, hush, — I will give you this leaf to keep; 

See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand ! 
There, that is our secret, go to sleep ! 

You will wake, and remember, and understand. 

McGroarty, a California philosopher, says : There 
are so many things to remember. And to forget the 
names of a thousand wonder workers, more or less, 



56 Physical Life 

who have been dead so long that it is time for them 
to come back again — what difference does it make ?- 

Attributed to the Great Prophet, Jesus, is the say- 
ing : "Take no thought of the morrow — what ye shall 
eat and wherewithal ye shall be clothed." Also cease 
from worry now over "things to remember." Suffi- 
cient unto the day is the worry thereof, for reaching 
the higher sphere, there are no time-tables to mark in- 
tervals, as here on earth, in reincarnations. Shake- 
speare's Seven Ages of Man will keep you busy over 
wonder- workings ! 

Civilization can be farther traced, thanks for that 
blessed book, the Bible. It is above all creeds, all na- 
tions, and only alert is its hint of beginning of every- 
thing, — the Spirit. Let us consider the first man, irre- 
spective of any garden, or ship, or how this first of 
the race was clothed — not being so favored as other 
animals that are naked. His warmth came from a fig 
leaf garment; and after Adam was told to hustle for 
himself, then his ingenuity suggested the suspenders 
for this fig leaf; his first invention, possibly! With 
an eager and a nipping air, he became a bit envious of 
well-clothed animals he looked on as his inferiors "in 
the sight of God," and did his first killing, to get fur 
robes. Why should Eve not have had attention ? Fe- 
males of all breeding pairs of animals have better care 
from the Creator, in the innate modesty or feature of 
life-regulation, than has man. 

What a long and unclean or brutal struggle our race 
has had ! Greeley, our wisest editor, wrote, "Go west, 
young man !" Both to the north and to the south the 
trend of population seldom goes, for the end of these 



And Higher Light 57 

journeys brings torturing cold. Even down to the 
days of a free Hebrew race, escaped from Egyptian 
bondage, but still carrying the Ark of the Covenant, 
the people rushed to new wars, bloody wars, very like 
conquests in America later, when the Red Man had to 
go. Jews wanted the territory Jehovah promised, a 
Holy land, and yet even unto this day that land is not 
very promising. 

There will still be our Sphynx question: Is the 
world better or worse for mankind? Not as to any 
one feature. God is no respecter of special life in the 
whole kingdom of nature, and if any of us should be 
so child-trusting as to ask special privileges or com- 
forts, we may (as the Bible relates to the whole ques- 
tion of immortality), assert, "Ye think ye have eternal 
life." The Creator fills no stockings for children at 
Christmas, but delegates to the parents and friends this 
loving service. If the agents or the dear little ones are 
untrue to a soul's trust, how can they trust the Unseen 
One? If, as thy child believes, thou art great and 
noble of soul, he knows no mistrust when Christmas 
comes, or at any time. Break his faith, or her faith, 
and mistrust even of the Greatest Prophet ensues, — 
when that truth was uttered for all to cheer us. The 
kingdom of God is within you. 

There is a straight way in life here, a straight path 
that leads thee later, and on until life begins here 
again for thee on earth; and if home is the heaven of 
thy desire, this next birth will bring to thee joy over 
reunions, and the new home will have transcendent 
phases of life, more life, that will grow better, larger 
of purpose throughout rebirths innumerable. 



58 Physical Life 

The Very Elect is not voted for by generality of 
electors; in fact, He breathed into you the breath of 
life, and in that condition only one ballot need be 
taken. We must take into the account Lo here's ! and 
Lo there's!! Had we Christians a unit, there would 
be but one sect to interpret the Bible. Lo, too, our 
many denominations of Christians. 

A little girl hit on a great truth when asked, "Who 
made you?" "God made me so high; — I growed the 
rest." We all grow more or less — some very bad, 
some very good. Those in the brutal way, loving 
strife; others as Jesus desires, His own beloved. 

Let us hope for another group of immortals reborn 
here, to rebuild, amplify our civilization, and to do 
the work left undone by the murdered Prophet, in 
spreading compassion that is love. 

This warning for young aviators : 

Our boy Jeremire 

Dun burnt in de fire; 

His airplane drawed de sun. 

We need not the traditionally pick-up story of af- 
fairs from savagest and crudest of life, in the early 
times, when good men of Sodom or Gomorra were 
as rare as hen teeth, as the saying is. Report is that 
in Jerusalem today are, as in earlier times, rivalries 
and fightings — mostly over religion. "Great is Diana 
of the Epesians," great is Jehovah, great is Moham- 
med, and so on. One clan still points out the grave 
of Adam, which excited the pious (?) humor of 
Mark II. 

A common saying is, "more holy than righteous," 



And Higher Light 59 

and has. ever mortal exhibited the qualities that truly 
belong to us all ? It does not stand to reason, for we 
have all grades in hypocrisy. Artemis Ward mistook 
for a common preacher (though a hypocrite likely) 
and who appealed to the humorist with eyes cast 
heavenward — as a sign-manual. Meeting with no re- 
sponse, the good man said, "This is a cold world." 
A. W., sizing the man up, and having no Bible at 
hand, blurted out, "You'll get into a hotter one by and 
bye; hot as hell." 

No fault attaches to Bible accounts, so valuable for 
reference; written from hearsay, these records can be 
construed as most valuable for study — conceptions of 
earliest traditional times. You must not take Jacob 
and his wives and concubines as a holy example novo, 
for life today if examples of Scriptures mean for 
"instruction" (example) would indicate no progress 
through the ages. Jesus surely fought and opposed 
the holy ideas in olden scriptures. An eye for an 
eye — and saying not anything of reproof in the scrip- 
tures about holiness of holy wars — "but I say unto 
you, love one another." 

I am not psychoanalytic nor of the pious — the very 
elect, but observe from all past experience, we do not 
get to the full understanding of life from our human 
nature. Experience of religion teaches that it has 
much of impulsive goodness, formal ceremonies or 
actions soon forgotten. Jesus no doubt had reference 
to this, religion too full of animal magnetism, for 
when speaking of a church (his was the open-air 
kind) when two or three in serious mood are met 
together. Then the higher light and life are manifest, 



60 Physical Life 

a spirit arises that will with the morning stars sing in 
utmost joy. A church should surely have the educa- 
tional feature, for at this ripe age of the world we 
may drop notions of altars, offerings to gods (burnt 
or otherwise). 

Rather too much of human nature is exhibited by 
school authorities in selecting teachers (a hint also to 
church authorities), the employed expecting a good 
time, to spend between the movies and mental con- 
cerns, as the "duties." In selecting help for churches 
or charities, the teachers should be given not any no- 
tions of ease, soft snaps, or time for selfish uses; but 
select the most competent of Good Samaritans, and 
not from mere scholarly or pious pretensions. 

This is an age of action, and those coming in a re- 
birth to take again some part in human affairs must 
hustle. No more of the loafing, hold-up dispositions 
"need apply," must go as the scoffer says, to hell — 
where the dark of polarity belongs. Times change 
and we with the times. Now great shake-ups from 
calamities recently, endured from prominence of 
hatred and war. 

Our President, since the devil dance of others, has 
been wise, careful and patriotic. With our Republic 
has always seemed the light of progress, or we would 
now, as at first, be in chains of slavery and under dic- 
tation of lazy autocrats or plutocrats. 

As showing the new trend, in America, I copy from 
James Oppenheim's late Times essay : 

"When its meaning is revealed, we see that the un- 
conscious wisdom is trying to tell us of ourselves, to 
reveal our real trouble, and even to lead us to a solu- 



And Higher Light 61 

tion of the difficulties. . . . What does one know of 
oneself? Human nature is a rich mystery, for not 
only is it compounded of our experience and our gifts, 
it is also inherited from the remote past. In each of 
us is the collective unconscious, the racial mind, which 
contains the wisdom, the power, the greatness of the 
entire past : the very source of inspiration, the spring 
from which have risen all our arts, inventions, re- 
ligions and sciences. . . . 

"One may wonder how by any psychological process 
one may come to this deeper insight. One cannot do 
it alone. Maeder, in his little book on the subject, 
likens the analytic process to Dante's 'Divine Comedy.' 
The analyst is the guide, Virgil, who leads the patient, 
Dante, first down through the inferno of his hidden 
abysses of nature, then up through Purgatory, the 
great overcoming. But at the peak of the Mountain 
of Purgatory, Virgil gives up his guidance, and 
Beatrice appears, Dante's own soul, now to lead him 
up through the paradise." 



62 Physical Life 



III 



When Tolstoy was excommunicated in 1901, he 
addressed the Orthodox Russian Church very candid 
letters as to his belief in Jesus and the Father of us 
all. Said, "Truth more than all else in the world he 
loved, and had greatest veneration for Jesus." His 
later years were spent amidst spies of the church, and 
very many pressing offers he had to die with church 
prospects for salvation at last. The wife of Tolstoy 
was evidently sent to spy on him, and take him from 
his prized last writings, — to burn such has long been 
the fashion of the pious vs. infidels. 

From a recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly I copy 
a Tolstoy letter of October 23, 1910: "I am a very 
sinful person, and my only occupation consists in 
mending myself, in the measure of my power and 
ability, from my numerous sins and sinful habits. I 
beseech God to help me in this cause, and He helps 
me. Though at the pace of a turtle, still I advance 
with His help. In this advancing I find that the sole 
sense purpose and benefit of my life. The kingdom 
of God is within us and the kingdom has to be won 
by force (that is, by effort). I believe in this, and 
exert all possible efforts for this; and here you come 
to offer me the performance of certain rites and the 
utterance of certain words, which would show that I 
consider as infallible truth all that which men who call 
themselves Church consider truth, and in consequence 
of which all my sins would be pardoned — pardoned 
somehow and by someone; and that I shall not only 



And Higher Light 63 

be exempt from the inner hard — but at the same 
time joyous, — spiritual work of self-improvement, but 
that I shall be somehow saved from something, and 
shall receive some kind of an eternal bliss. 

"Why, dear Brother Dimitri, do you address me 
with such a strange proposal? Have I tried to con- 
vert you, have I counseled you to rid yourself of that, 
in my opinion, pernicious delusion which you profess, 
and into which you painstakingly lure thousands and 
thousands of unfortunate children and common peo- 
ple, perverting their minds? Then why do you not 
leave me in peace, a man who, by his age, stands with 
one foot in the grave, and who calmly awaits his 
death ? My conversion to the church faith might have 
had sense were I a boy, or a grown-up atheist, or an 
illiterate yakout who had never heard about the 
church-faith. But I am 82 years old, was brought up 
in the very same deception which still dominates you, 
to which you are inviting me, and from which, with 
greatest suffering and efforts I freed myself many 
years ago, adopting a Christian — not ecclesiastical — 
point of view, which gives me the possibility of a 
peaceful, joyous life directed toward self-perfection, 
and the readiness for as peaceful and joyous a death, 
in which I see a return to God of love, out of whom I 
issued forth. With brotherly love, Leo Tolstoy." 

Orthodox church, as we know, has ever been fore- 
most in spreading evil reports. If hatred as so often 
did not stop short of crudest forms of murder, for 
its "enemies," independent thinkers. Our own lover 
of liberty, Thomas Payne, died, as evil report gave 
out, a drunkard, who wanted to confess his errors in 



64 Physical Life 

speaking of orthodoxy. Equally false have been re- 
ports that Tolstoy was maddened by his unorthodox 
writings, and started off in his old age to die in some 
unknown wilderness. The letter above corrects these 
reports. 

Possibly the worst blunder committed in the history 
of pious sects and idolatry in early ages, was in hav- 
ing men set apart, no family or family relations, to 
attend to the altars of the gods. As the Maker of us 
all clearly indicates as His will and our instincts verify 
it, sexes cannot be apart, and children in all homes 
have a clinging to and almost worship of the parents. 
Babes are the best gift of mankind, most highly 
prized by all surely. Child-trust and innocence are 
makers of true character and worth. Return to earth 
in all rebirths, ever rouses the sacredest of songs, 
"Glory to God in the highest; peace on earth; good 
will to all mankind." And this language, and song of 
glory, is indicated even down to the humblest creatures. 

When in life's common ways, 

With cheerful feet we go; 
When in the steps we tread 

Who trod the ways of woe — ■ 
Thou that once on mother's knee 

Wert a little one like me, 
Thou hast sent me here to be 

Born of human-kind like Thee, 
From natvire's inmost heart 

(The final film withdraw!) 
Eternal silence reighs 

Bound in Eternal Law 
It is enough: we ask not where Thou art, 

Present in space, or in the faithful heart. 
Unchanging Law binds all 

And Nature's law we see — 
Hope of those that have no other. 

— Palgrave. 



And Higher Light 65 

Mark Twain and many others have toured to the 
Holy Land, to get sight of holy relics. Our Mark was 
shown the grave of Adam, and if some scriptural 
things he writ about in the Holy Land are found — 
say among Mark II papers — maybe valuable. Photo 
of that grave ; and possibly Mark II having measured 
the hole, has the new scripture to quote how the holy 
dust of Adam was found ! He, Mark II, an American, 
knew how to be trusty, having sure swallowed Wash- 
ington hatchet as part of our scripture. 

Can any value the sayings of Jesus more than I? 
But even the monk reporting was human; he surely 
was when the prayer pleads with the Father of. us all 
to lead us not into temptation. God Almighty does no 
such mischief. In the scripture of truth called John, 
quoted on another page, his record of wars and 
rumors of wars in or near heaven (possibly had ref- 
erence to wars between Jews and the conquering 
Romans). It seems very probable — scriptures were 
pick-ups, as printers call fat-takes. 

After Jesus had been cruelly murdered as a rebel 
against Romans, and his spirit passed on to the Great 
Path of being, then will come his rebirth — possibly 
back to earth to now receive the wonted welcome and 
not again have to curse a whole generation as pre- 
viously — "Ye generation of vipers !" 

They stooped in the gleam of the faint light, over 

The print of themselves on the limpid gloom; 
And she lifted her full palm toward her lover, 

With her lips prepared for the words of doom. 
But the warm heart rose, and the cold hand fell, 

And the pledge of her faith sprang, sweet and clear, 
From a holier source than the old saint's well, 

From the never-ebbing tide of Love — a tear. 

— R. D. Blackmore. 



66 Physical Life 

Sleep, under the law of life, as alternating with the 
wakeful period, seems a polarity existing between 
everyday existence and a higher life. No creature 
escapes going over the Path. To make a personal ex- 
planation, will refer to a fact occurring in March, 
1922. I received notice that a beloved cousin had died 
after long illness, at Atlantic City, N. J. On the night 
succeeding notice, I dreamed of her. Passing in 
dreamland from one ocean to another, I detected 
cousin in a position requiring help, a kind of trap. 
Rushing to help her, I noted very distinctly that it was 
a gray dress she wore. The vision faded, but not until 
her joyful looks disclosed that she was far from hav- 
ing any fear in her peculiar situation. Writing to 
brother of deceased later, wished him to state how the 
sister was dressed for the funeral. The reply proved 
that my far-away vision in sleep was correct! As a 
fact, deceased was buried in a gray dress exactly cor- 
responding to my vision ! Had one's dream followed 
the circumstance of meeting in late years, no surprise 
in the dream could occur. But here is a fact of dis- 
tance and unusual sight — of the gray dress; thus re- 
calling some spiritual agencies, as spoken of by Plato 
and Whitman — that time and place are of the earth 
and have no spiritual bearing. 

Home is the corner stone of our civilization, says 
President Harding. We may read of any land of 
promise, but the home therein is the great concern. 
No home, no heaven ! 

By a theory I claim, Rebirth, we shall know our 
promised land will be located where our parents and 
friends have been or are, ever next us with love — in 



And Higher Light 67 

the eternal and the earthly shapes. We know our own, 
as Jesus said of the sheep separated thus only for 
a while. 

"And what has happened to the colored people is 
that there are those among them who have acquired 
a degree of culture equal to that of any race on earth. 
There is today among the negroes of America a large 
class that has placed itself beyond the sneers of negro- 
baiters and negro-haters. For that class the "color 
line" has faded away forever. The people of that 
class can and do look serenely down on whomever sets 
himself up as a mental or moral superior. — /. S. 
McGroarty. 

Dr. Maudsley says, "It has been justly remarked 
that if we were actually to do in sleep all the strange 
things which we dream we do, it would be necessary 
to put every man in restraint before he went to bed; 
for, as Cicero said, dreamers would do more strange 
things than madmen. A dream put into action must 
indeed look very much like insanity (<?. g. the ordinary 
sleep-vigil), as insanity has at times the look of a 
waking dream." 

Somnambulists act without any visible sense of direc- 
tion or purpose. I had an uncle, Caleb Hood of Lan- 
caster County, Pa., who in youth often climbed upon 
a high roof and from the peak was alone, star gazing 
or to be spiritually alone and away from earth's affairs. 
In his very dangerous climbing he was never hurt. 
His father was epileptic. 

Hibernating animals have the instinct to sleep 
through seasonal intervals. Securing abundance in 



68 Physical Life 

days of plenty, the sleepy animal, the fat animal, re- 
tires through the long inclement season to sleep. 

Body is not anything important; so cling close to 
the everlasting soul. Sleep is the near-soul restorer, 
this you have always, but now and they only a rebirth, 
awhile in mortal being just as you enjoy changes of 
day and night. 

"Every man's work shows what god he serves, 
For faith is a path without any curves. 
We must all hear our master's word before we can do ; 
Faith will come by hearing him, which will put us through." 

The four lines we quote here from the new poetry 
have more of good sense than all samples of sex- 
compositions usually do, appearing formless. 

It is a long while since the sun stood still at Gibeon 
and the moon at Ajalon, to see the invading Jews, 
ferocious under a ferocious leader, Joshua, drive out 
of their homes all natives in the Holy Land that God 
Jehovah had promised the children of Israel. Later 
on, when Hebrews began to know from a Higher Light 
for all nations that called by Christians the Light of 
Christ, Jesus the compassionate Jew, He prayed for 
an era free from war. 

Education not stored in your memory, your soul, is 
surely not a real light. Gods, and such as Joshua the 
killer, have passed, I hope, as Jesus, a Jew, gives a new 
commandment, Love one another ! 

Later generations that sprang from the earlier births 
show a larger and finer brain, and consciousness of 
purer light in the soul. Earliest of the Scriptures gave 
a primal mandate of the Highest, referring to good 
and evil ; so with Druids and others followed a say- 



And Higher Light 69 

ing, "If the tree bear not good fruit, cast it into the 
fire!" If a farmer spends time cultivating bad stock, 
how can he thrive? Then how can nations prosper 
that allow evil men to rule? Pure democracy says, 
Cut out the dead wood ! 

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe 
and take for granted ! nor to find talk and discourse, 
but to weigh and consider. — Bacon. 

Orthodox Christians, fleeing to America to escape 
religious persecutions by England's state church., grew 
very intolerant, and began to kill Quakers and witches. 
I quote from a new book published by Humphrey Mil- 
ford, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. 

"Ritual Witchcraft — the Dianic cult — embraces the 
religious beliefs and rituals of the people known in late 
mediaeval times as 'Witches.' The evidence proves 
that underlying the Christian religion was a cult prac- 
tised by many classes of the community. It can be 
traced back to pre-Christian times, and appears to be 
the ancient religion of Western Europe, which, carried 
to America, caused Cotton Mather to say, 'The witches 
are organized like Congregational Churches.' There 
was among the witches a body of elders — the Coven — 
which managed the local affairs of the cult, and a man 
who, like the minister, held the chief place, though as 
God that place was infinitely higher in the eyes of the 
congregation than any held by a mere human being. 
In some of the larger congregations there was a per- 
son, inferior to the Chief, who took charge in the 
Chief's absence. In Southern France, however, there 
seems to have been a Grand Master who was supreme 
over several districts. The position of the chief 



70 Physica.. Life 

woman of the cult is still somewhat obscure. It may 
be the cult mentioned in Scripture : 'Great is Diana of 
the Ephesians.' " 

Little is known of the animal nature. In Egypt of 
old there was no sacredness of a human being recog- 
nized religiously over the animals ; and in Greece at the 
height of art there were so many requirements of man 
for the horse that a tradition grew that they were 
formed together. Science teaches, however, that 
through all the evolutions, man has shrunken physic- 
ally, but expanded mentally; the horse has greatly 
gained physically. In Grecian times the centaur was 
reckoned a once real animal. In the city of Taor- 
mena, Italy, can be seen typical man-monkey, intelli- 
gent man with a tail. 

Behold, how these religionists love each other: at the 
Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, even where they in real- 
ity fight like wolves, when the gentle Jesus surely is 
far from them. These do not regard a command to 
love one another. Why then seek holy places to dis- 
honor purest memorials? If idolatry lead you into 
savagery, how expect a better world when you pass 
with your degradations marked on your soul record 
in this life? If you love the old home, and keep in 
remembrance all the joys of earth, you are fitting your- 
selves possibly by many rebirths for the "amen cor- 
ner," as the saying is, for the place of many mansions, 
on any habitable sphere, in the skies, promised for the 
elect. Above all, at any rebirth, do not neglect your 
soul-gifts from God. Sweet brain-path memories — 
dearest in the book of memory, always with you, 



And Higher Light 71 

reached ever in sights and sounds, not of any sphere 
especially, along your path ! 

Therefore, O friends, if you are of my mind, 

When we are passed the French and English strait, 

Let us seek news of that desired gate 

To immortality and blessed rest 

Within the landless waters of the west; 

But still a little to the southward steer, .... 

Spice trees set waving by the western wind, 

And gentle folk who know no guile at least, 

And many a bright-winged bird and soft-skinned beast, 

For gently must the year upon them fall. 

— Morris' Earthly Paradise. 

We always have carpings as to the faults in nature, 
and ye proud scholars have been of late finding many 
faults in Shakespeare, the child of nature, in all his 
writings. He is decried mostly because he was not a 
university man. Shakespeare was plainly, openly, uni- 
versal, and not particular about small things. 

A recent writer, Prof. Powell, about early orthodox 
religions mentions services in Crete where devotees 
danced to most excellent dance music, and hymns that 
exacted the best of trained singing. He says, "There 
is little permanence for a religion consisting only of 
miracle and ritual, and less for one of magic; and 
these types are doomed to pass away." 

THE COWBOY'S PRAYER 

Oh, Lord, I've never lived where churches grow, 

I love creation better as it stood 
That day you finished it so long ago, 

And looked upon your work and called it good. 

I know that others find you in the light 
That filters down through tinted window panes, 

And yet I seem to feel you near tonight 
In the dim, quiet starlight on the plains. 



72 Physical Life 

I thank you, Lord, that I am placed so well ; 

That you have made my freedom so complete, 
That I'm no slave of whistle, clock or bell, 

Or weak-eyed prisoner of wall or street. 

Just let me live my life as I've begun, 

And give me work that's open to the sky; 

Make me a partner of the wind and sun, 
And I won't ask a life that's soft or high. 

Let me be easy on the man that's down ; 

And make me square and generous with all ; 
I'm careless sometimes, Lord, when I'm in town, 

But never let them say I'm mean or small. 

Make me as big and open as the plains, 
As honest as the horse between my knees, 

Clean as the wind that blows behind the rains, 
Free as the hawk that circles down the breeze. 

Forgive me, Lord, when I sometimes forget, 
You understand the reasons that are hid, 

You know the little things that gall and fret, 
You know me better than my mother does. 

Just keep an eye on all that's done and said, 
Just right me sometimes when I turn aside, 

And guide me on the long, long trail ahead 
That stretches upward toward the Great Divide. 

— Badger Clark. 

Inabilities of our priestly class are mostly because of 
bad training that may be traced from the beginning. 
In days of idolatry there was chosen a certain class of 
men assigned to keep the hands of a lower class off the 
sacred thing. For ages the assignment lasted, and in 
some respects for the mentally lowest of peoples, as 
can be traced today; but now culture of all races has 
risen until the Spirit of God is manifest. In fact, to- 
day the "holy men" really and truly fight against the 
Eternal One and for idolatry. 

Our modern beliefs are for all humanity, as Jesus 
taught the people, not for the "upper class." No man 



And Higher Light 73 

can rise above the evident and well understood behest 
of the true Scripture. "By the sweat of thy brow 
shalt thou earn thy bread." But the lazy class assert, 
"The world owes us a living." Any place at an altar 
must be the hirelings of idol worship, now descended 
into mere custom. Educational work, or work in hos- 
pitals, require no Very Reverends. Only good charity 
workers need apply. You may, not loving exertion, se- 
lect thus a needed branch of work — but work for your- 
self — if you have the means, furnish the means to 
carry on the good work. 

No more school sports, if these innocents are to seri- 
ously turn attention to God's altar and the church trap- 
pings of ANY denomination, in the house of God or 
gods. In reading, to begin with Genesis, the urchin 
is told, Man was made of the dust of the earth. Not 
very educational is this, for a fact ! A book on geol- 
ogy will tell a very different story. There was no dust 
until made in millions of years later by tramplings of 
man and other animals. So of the Ark story : very in- 
definite and misleading, to take a lawyer, sure, or paid 
preacher, to tell you straight. 

Aristocracies in either form, churchly or govern- 
mental, are taboo in any republic, for the wars they 
have created in all ages have very much hampered the 
true growth and resourcefulness of the people. 

Life on other planets, if we judge from conditions 
here, has constant changes and evolutions. With the 
horse, we know his physical life has tended to the im- 
provement in size, while that of man goes to the men- 
tal make-up, more of spiritual change. We know from 
experience in earth's past, that races enslaved can only 



74 Physical Life 

after great lapses of time assume the most upright 
phase and be clear of gypsyings. With lower animals, 
they understand our ways and words, but never speak. 

In Leaves of Grass, my old companion, Walt Whit- 
man, wrote concerning his soul : "I have fingered 
every shore with thee!" Even today we are worried 
touching drinkables, and in our U. S. Constitution is 
prohibition touching alcohol to be drank by the weak- 
headed. It is a poison. 

As the schools teach, there are many worms having 
each the two sexes, and all sex matters are free of 
dust. That the earth had its origin in fluidity, — cooled 
steam with the sun's help in sending its power by grav- 
ity of heat in very fine particles. So when life was 
sent to earth, a Higher Life it was, came with an im- 
pulse we know not of. 

Army worms, pet ones, take to the sea in undersea 
crafts used only in the latest of our wars. Last we 
hope to see of that breed. Pests to farmers plan their 
forays at stated intervals in the dark. Both kinds of 
pests are to be dreaded. 

Many good people, from suggestions of priests or 
ministers, have urged our lawmakers to permit the use 
of the Bible in schools. It needs not much argument 
to convince the thoughtful that this would not be in 
the interest of education. The child must have a time 
for childish things, yet on going to school he is to be 
educated. When told to read from the Word of God 
the little one is puzzled. "No one has seen God at any 
time." 

About an ancient religious belief I quote one of 
Erasmus' Colloquies: "During a furious storm at sea, 



And Higher Light 75 

not a few fell flat on the deck, and began to worship 
the sea, pouring all the oil they could get hold of upon 
the waters, soothing it, just as we are wont to do to 
an irritated prince. O most merciful sea, most noble 
sea, most worthy sea! O most beautiful sea! grow 
calm and save us. Many prayers of this kind they 
kept chanting to the deaf sea. Some were only seasick, 
most of them were making vows. One Englishman 
was there who kept promising mountains of gold to 
Our Lady of Walsingham if ever he set foot on land 
alive. Some made many promises to the wood of the 
cross in one place, and others to it in another. A few 
promised to turn Carthusians. One there was who 
bound himself to go to St. James of Campostello with 
bare feet and head, his body covered only with a shirt 
of iron mail, and begging his bread along the road. I 
could not but laugh, as I heard one vowing as loud as 
he could bellow lest he should not be attended to, a 
wax figure as big as the St. Christopher who stands 
on the top of the church in Paris — more like a moun- 
tain than a statue. While he was thus vociferating 
at his best, an acquaintance that happened to be stand- 
ing next to him gave him a nudge, and added a hint, 
'Mind what you promise,' he says, 'even if you sell by 
auction everything you possess you could not pay this.' 
The other replied, in a most subdued tone, so that 
St. Christopher should not hear, forsooth, 'Hold your 
tongue, you idiot. Do you think I am speaking my 
real mind? If only once I set my foot ashore I should 
not give him as much as a tallow candle.' " 

Our Holy Bible, with all the uses made of it, — to be 
worshipped as the object of all things holy; to be sub- 



76 Physical Life 

ject of study for millions of the thoughtful in all gen- 
erations, — is, I think, still a mystery. For the world- 
ling it is an idol ; for those who read it by the Inner 
Light, as was that light with Jesus, it is "the light of 
the world" 

Let it be understood that the author is not quarrel- 
ing with religion, but so far as it concerns Jesus — 
many of us wish His rebirth may be often of earth, 
until all aristocracies and churches of that kind, — or 
admixture of these, — have been quelled by common 
consent. Some persist in saying we are heaven-called — 
ideally perfect in our Biblical interpretations; but all 
may settle into one belief, that no books are kept in a 
higher place than here on earth. If religions were 
from above, beliefs would be all alike. A theory that 
we all have by instinct is of self-preservation, and for 
union in a government, as lower animals exhibit in 
their flocks. 

A reason for our calling Jesus the Lord is that He 
is and has long been leader in human democracies. 
The nearer we get to republican form, the nearer to 
the Lord and God. 

There is no middle ground from the idolatry of old 
to the community of man. Aristocracy and such as 
beliefs seem mere phantoms. 

I will give and I will take are selfish notions, not 
possibly inheriting in a Creator of All; but if human 
rights are interfered with a Scripture rightly says of 
Him, "I will repay." 

As to reincarnation, being reborn, that is a theory 
of life. You will not be murdered if you fail to be- 
lieve in it, so go your individual way ; but help the help- 



And Higher Light 77 

less, and do unto others as you wish to be done by. 
Beliefs are of no account. 

To make a Roman holiday required many sacrifices. 
Captured queens and kings, bedraggled and in chains, 
and so many other captives, dragged to the Coliseum 
and to death. All the spoils of war and of savagery 
became offerings to some god. On his chariot was the 
conqueror's sign — so gods and men might not get 
mixed, the glaring sigh, "Remember thou art a man." 
The spoils of empire were heaped mountain high. 

Later, the glory of conquerors and all their belong- 
ings faded, as fades the pictures on the movie screens 
— about as little worth. 

The majesty of old Rome, of savagery, replaced 
awhile by a Christian ruler, Constantine, he to leave 
the ruins and seek shelter in the East, Constantinople. 
Now we have two rival powers, both "followers of the 
Lamb of God," or as Carlyle said of them, Papas. 
Seneca the pagan says, "What today are your suffer- 
ings compared with the flame and the rack ? and yet in 
the midst of sufferings of that sort I have seen men 
not only groan, that is little ; not only complain, that is 
little ; not only reply, that too is little. But I have seen 
them smile, and smile with a good heart." 

Did Jesus ever join or recognize a church, except as 
His mother led him ? His pure religion and undented 
was, be helpful for others, and remain undefiled by the 
world. Surely this is credo enough for the Christian 
religion later! Have we any church that is limited to 
this? — if we have showdowns of creeds, these are as 
the "movies." It is of record that Jesus said to a 
disciple who had been a baptizer, "I will suffer this," — 



78 Physical Life 

but I surmise He meant no form that binds to a creed. 
Doctors of divinity who had asked the lad Jesus to 
converse, did not find that they could later "convert" 
him. A little later, in torture on the cross, He ex- 
claimed as dying, cursing, O ye generation of vipers ! 
Should Jesus be reborn to earth, at this time, would He 
be likely to seek knowledge as taught at Bible Insti- 
tutes? I think not, for His unusual intelligence 2000 
years ago, and His soul goes marching on. What a 
great and good helper He surely would be today for 
all of us! 

My suggestion came for adopting the so-called Re- 
birth Theory of Higher Light, and its opposite, the 
physical being, from Franklin H. Heald's "The Pro- 
cession of Planets. In our world there can only be 
originally, motion from heat ,and its opposite in polar- 
ity is cold, the Creator's forces in nature. As life be- 
longs to the higher light of a soul, I insist that the 
polarities dominate even as between the bad and the 
good — devil for evil and a good God. In Darwin you 
will find only references to life here on earth: Fal- 
staff, as Shakespeare shows him a go-between, says, 
"And if I be virtuous will there be no more cakes and 
ale?" 

Near the same locality in England were born — a few 
years only the s one older than the other — two babes, 
destined to be great leaders in religious freedom : 
George Fox and John Bunyan. The former became 
advocate of a Light within, the other was author of 
Pilgrim's Progress, that directs Christian to a GREAT 
LIGHT before him and others, always. 

Men of intelligence, in Jerusalem who had courage 



And Higher Light 79 

of their convictions and ideas not formed into creeds) 
were very scarce when the question of having Jesus, 
the idealist and thinker, make open proclamation of 
dissent from Jewish doctrines, — and He Himself a 
Jew! Says Prof. Fiske : "So is the kingdom of God, 
as if a man should cast seed upon the earth; and 
should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed 
should spring up and grow, he knoweth not how. The 
earth beareth fruit of herself ; first the blade, then the 
ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the fruit 
is ripe, straightway he putteth forth the sickle, because 
the harvest is come." Evolution is defined by Pro- 
fessor Le Conte as "continuous progressive change 
according to certain laws and by means of resident 
forces." 

We only begin to understand, notwithstanding so 
many things thought very holy in tha New Testament, 
that some biblical facts abound of supreme use for hu- 
manity in the books referring to Jesus. Our Outlook 
explains this : The gardener can plow the ground and 
fertilize it, and can guard the growing tree and spray 
and prune it ; but he cannot give life to either seed or 
soil. Growth from seed and soil is God's way of mak- 
ing an apple — continuous, progressive growth by a 
force residing in the seed and in the soul. Sow dia- 
monds in the soil and nothing happens; for the dia- 
monds have not life. President of Yale, Dr. James R. 
Angell, thinks that the Pilgrim Fathers are 'extolled in 
terms which would have brought the blush of shame 
to their tanned and sallow cheeks," and that the praise 
is not only excessive, but is often "ludicrously miscon- 
ceived and misdirected." 



80 Physical Life 

"Between two fires" is an old phrase, and a truth, 
with man and other animals. I saw this exemplified 
at Rose Hill, my home, when a new neighbor there 
wished to search my hillside lot to find his escaped 
wild cat. In Arizona he caught a male and a female, 
and wished to raise them for pets. They bore captivity 
a while, but instinct prevailed — this out of the way 
place was not the mountains, their home. The male 
kitten broke for liberty and disappeared. He was 
caught a week later in a nearby garret, and the owner 
carried him (everybody else afraid) to the cage again, 
and to his mate. Whether or no she had become 
reconciled, and trusted a mere man, it never will be 
known. The wilder one, now in the cage, with un- 
tamed instincts, one day killed and mangled the mate. 
Why? 

The last and greatest Prophet of the Jews came of 
a good mother and father, and had a good home and 
trade, carpenter. The doctors of His church could 
not "convert" the boy Jesus (Joshua) of this family, 
so for being an infidel, associating like the other poor 
Jews with the publicans and sinners, He was outlawed. 
He, the very flower of humanity! Church and state 
in darkness, lo, these many centuries, have had wonted 
evolutions since the infidel Jesus suffered on the cross, 
and now in America the state is exalted, and the church 
— between the kill and cure medicine, meekly survives. 

Instincts are the lead-all in life; the humble follow 
this call oftener than the great, the rich, the so-called 
wise and worldly. A creed is noted in the church, but 
we have the cute priest — once he, we know, advised a 
searcher after truth — George Fox, the Quaker — to 



And Higher Light 81 

quiet his soul by running with the girls, smoke tobacco 
and drink a little. This priest was not speaking higher 
than other worldly wise ones. 

Our Bible, true to all instincts of mankind, calls 
attention to a study of man's foreknowledge. All ani- 
mal kind has a light to perceive its course at death, 
and craves to return to nature — to former habitats in 
the wild state, the woods and mountains green, and 
''beside the still waters." 

Pierre Loti of France made comparison a great 
feature in life, and chose the cat as a close friend, 
because she almost talked with him, through the eye. 
His pets always escaped before their death, knowing 
death would not end all — and all life was craving for 
particular locations on earth. The old home, of the 
spirit — the heaven we say. That flash, the vision of 
death, "we know neither the day, nor the hour" for it. 
This period having illumination of the soul and not 
of this world. John Burroughs, dying in the car, 
asked in bewilderment, "Are we near home?" Earth, 
his ideal home. 

Church and state powers in Europe during the Mid- 
dle Ages were not favorable to having the New Year 
begin at or near our Christmas date, but the old 
heathen festival spirit was too deeply established to be 
easily thrown out; the Christ mass was not substi- 
tuted for New Year day. Prof. Poole, of the British 
Academy, says the Year of Grace period for the con- 
tinent, carried by the English missionaries, having 
learned that near the same period in the year a harvest 
festival of the aborigines was celebrated — so the 
churches had the Christ mass to occur as it does, and 



82 Physical Life 

New Year later. The church festival of Easter, also 
Lady Day, etc., were kept to mark New Years before 
our Old Style was replaced by the proper one of 
astronomers. The monks were careless and ignorant, 
so church records are giving New Year day — from 
September to March ! 

The Times of Los Angeles wisely asserts that the 
church should be a retaining wall at the edge of the 
cliff rather than a hospital at its base. 

That eternal riddle, Life and Death, the here and 
the there, that is highest in importance, can do little to 
enlighten the near-animal nature in many. Schools 
can not do more than stimulate the thoughtful, but our 
form of government compels equal attention for all. 
Artemus Ward in humorous way speaks of showmen, 
who seek a living by exhibiting the wonderful, or the 
Billy Sunday style of frightening people into their nets, 
when the humor was shown of a man raking in money 
"to look at the sublime eclipse of the sun! — 10 cents 
only! Come right inside this open-top tent and look 
up!!" 

When dying, the great Goethe exclaimed, "More 
Light !" as nearing the end of life here, he possibly saw 
the Great Light John Bunyan speaks of in Pilgrim's 
Progress, and the repeated mental state referred to 
by George Fox, of an Inner Light. John Burroughs, 
lately dying, was not clear of the world's visions of 
creatures he loved here, and asked, "Are we near 
home?" I have a last photo taken near our Arroyo of 
him, that I think should never have existed, — of a last 
illness that prsented tortures at a time that even our 
animals seek to be alone, earth passing. 



And Higher Light 83 

On this subject I quote, author unknown : 

"When some one leaves this world to go on to an- 
other, why it is usually said that the person 'died'? Is 
it right to say that John Burroughs, for instance, is 
'dead,' when we know very well that he still lives, and 
that his feet are wandering in fields of asphodel in 
another country? That which was really John Bur- 
roughs could not die. The poor, old worn temple that 
was his body crumbled back to the dust from whence 
it came. But John Burroughs, himself, is living still. 

"The Christian Scientists say that he has 'passed 
on.' The Salvation Army say of their departed com- 
rades that they have been 'promoted.' Both these 
phrases are infinitely better than the common usage." 

Franklin H. Heald, of Los Angeles, when first he 
published his Procession of Planets, about 1907, went 
on camping trips, until 1921, then, with Mrs. Heald, 
located near Death Valley. 

Men of science avoided belief in his theory of the 
universe, just as men keep up notions of the past until 
the show-down comes. This in humanity, as a white 
feather on a blackbird, meant that the flock instinct in 
nature must be paramount. We are yet in that stage 
of civilization as the Indian, our predecessor of the 
soil, has belief in — "medicine men." 

F. H. Heald explains in his Procession of the Plan- 
ets the basic principles in nature thus: Matter has 
three forms, and two motions, extending and contract- 
ing. Water, we know, takes up the least room the 
instant before it is in the solid form — when it is in a 
crystalized state its atoms lie between straight parallel 
lines. When 32 degrees of heat are added its bulk is 



84 Physical Life 

decreased and it becomes a liquid. Increase heat to 
212 degrees, it becomes a gas and occupies 1730 times 
the space it occupied as a solid. So all matter in- 
creases in bulk as it is heated. Gas at the sun below 
must hold the gas above up as far as it can, and when 
it meets the gas from the next sun — where upward 
expansion from the two are equal, of course it can go 
no farther. Gas is composed of spherical atoms, each 
one from the sun held up and forced up by pressure 
from the sun, — held up and pressed up by pressure 
from the next one. A pile of these atoms has the 
force of expansion by heat at the sun, so must force 
them up and hold them there until they become cold 
enough to contract into solid matter; then they begin 
to fall again, by gravity, to the sun, or center from 
which they expanded. If there was only the force of 
heat in nature, all matter would be expanded into space 
as gas, never to return ; and if there was only the force 
of gravity or contraction in nature, all matter would 
finally be concentrated into one vast body. In either 
case all would be silence and death. 

When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the force of 
gravity or contraction, by wondering why the apple 
fell to the earth instead of into the sky, if he had 
wondered also how it came into the tree top he would 
have discovered the law of heat expansion, the oppo- 
site of gravity, or the other great force in nature. It 
was the force of expansion by heat acting on the soil 
which sent the sap up through the pores of the tree to 
the apple blossom to build the apples; and it is the 
same throughout all nature. It is the force of heat 
generated by the friction of decay or chemical decom- 



And Higher Light 85 

position of food in our stomachs that warms our blood, 
feeds our tissues, muscles and nerves, and sustains our 
life; but it is the force of gravity, or contraction, that 
collects the substances, condenses and ossifies the 
bones, muscles and tissue, finally bringing the ripeness 
and wrinkles of old age and death. 

When matter returns to the sun, as solid matter 
crystalized into separate elements, and is expanded into 
gas tens of thousands of times its bulk when solid, and 
is swelled up into space, it is composed of a perfect 
mixture of all the elements in matter and nature. It is 
forced up into intensely cold regions of space, where 
it contracts into solid matter, and gathers into worlds. 
It separates again into different elements, such as 
water, air, and the various minerals, as it goes through 
its evolutions — returning to the sun, thus to start 
force to again release it at the end of another journey. 

This outpouring of matter and energy from the sun 
in every direction in space, and a continual returning 
of this matter and energy, guided by the minor forces 
in the great circling orbits of the planets, moons and 
other bodies, — is an everlasting movement, until the 
suns fail. 

Lockyer says the visible universe, as distinguished 
from our own universe, is less extended in some direc- 
tions. They are most numerous, the bodies ,as a zone 
which crosses the Milky Way at right angles ; the con- 
stellation of Virgo being so rich in them that a portion 
of it is termed the Nebulous region of Virgo; — this 
being at right angles to the Milky Way is on the plane 
of the sun's equator, and as Mr. Heald says, is exactly 
where we must expect to find the condensed crystals of 



86 Physical Life 

this expanded gas, — where new worlds should be 
forming. The negatively charged Nebula is the sup- 
posed cause of rotation from electrical disturbance. 

From outworn theories in astronomy, we find that 
the stars are supposed to have "influence" upon us of 
the earth ! 



And Higher Light 87 



BOOK TWO 

From conquering Rome taking possession of the so- 
called Holy Land at the time Jesus worked, suffered 
and died that cruel death on the cross, there may be 
excuses for the Jewish church showing great resent- 
ment against a member (Joshua or Jesus) for offering 
to reform the holy order of a holy church; but cor- 
ruption had done its deadly work among even the 
anointed and leaders of church. Kill the rebel ! And 
they did ; but that murder has had far-reaching effect. 
The old hymn, Dies Ire, says : 

The Jews were wrought to cruel madness, 
Christians fled in fear and sadness ; 
Mary stood the cross beside. 

Ignorance in the population had prevented any per- 
ceptible change from the preaching of the reformers, 
Jesus and John. A woman at the well , tradition tells 
us, heard Jesus speak", telling of all the "things that 
ever I did." Astonishing! a fortune-teller abroad! 
Others reported the dead had been given life again, by 
a rebel against God, who had in His wisdom assigned 
Death. Then, too, Jesus had driven devils from in- 
sane persons into swine, and drowned the bad spirits 
with the hogs! 

Intelligent and religious mortals everywhere have 
had lasting sorrow over the loss of Jesus, in His early 
prime; but traditions (His writings evidently de- 
stroyed, as He was not an ignoramus), having with 
the Father's care been preserved through all the cen- 



88 Physical Life 

turies since ! Some idol worshippers , holding to the 
idols of the earliest of mankind, had the audacity to 
revive the dead forms of "altar," "died for us," so His 
cruel death, a matter of course, as taking the place of 
a slaughtered beast ,and priests grabbing for the 
"burnt offerings." But such a stretch of cruel fancy 
seems horrible! Shame, like fanaticism, has no 
bounds. This being an age of reason, there need be 
no more hesitation, as when the Roman judge, sentenc- 
ing Jesus, said, "What is truth? I find no fault in this 
man." The coming of a Christ, a man of God, was 
the belief of pious Hebrews ; and when that one came, 
"eating and drinking," living with common folks, he 
was despised, forsaken, crucified. From the world's 
terrible warrings and cruelties in every form, surely it 
was the Christ — when He preached Love, Compassion, 
and Peace! 

Greater the preacher — so few are great and consci- 
entiously pious — then the greater thinker; divine na- 
ture being nearest the Divine Being. Are divines re- 
lated to the Good Samaritan, or too many to the de- 
spicable Levites? 

Brooks, the good man and famous preacher, said : 

That makes us purer, makes us wiser, too, 

And every beauty coming on a beam 

Of God's sweet sunlight, brings new truth to view. 

"Keep, O pleasant Melvin stream, 
Thy sweet laugh in shade and gleam ! 
On the Indian's grassy tomb 
Swing, O flowers, your bells of bloom ! 
Deep below as high above, 
Sweeps the circle of God's love." 

—Whittier. 



And Higher Light 89 

When Jean Valjean felt the death-damp gathering 
about him, Victor Hugo put into his mouth these reg- 
nant words : "I do not know what is the matter with 
me; but I see LIGHT!" 

My old friend, Americus D. Buck, has an expres- 
sion, when I offer some book to him, "That author 
doesn't write for me." We cannot school ourselves 
into something our nature does not care for. Cram- 
ming and memorizing is not a thing of the spirit if 
the spirit does not absorb the thoughts or images. 
That is the reason for waste of time in school or 
church. Mind has its own memorizing cord beginning 
at the very beginning of life, or of instincts earlier, 
thoughts of snakes or dragons of some long past ages 
torment the timid always. Even physical peculiarities 
of your life may linger. A man was seen lately at 
Taormina, in Sicily, who has a tail like a chimpanzee. 
Several thousand years ago, possibly, his strain of in- 
heritance came of the meaner animal. 

Darwin was a near-martyr for having said our race 
sprang out of an earlier form of life — the chimpanzee, 
to illustrate, having all the bones of animal structure 
man has. The bridge to reach lower than humanity is 
now resting upon a figment of belief in some other 
compromise structure. Pride goeth before a fall. Act 
well your- part — there all the honor lies ; the dishonor 
may rest on your mean monkeying like the monkey. 

Roman Catholic artists picture the dying Jesus on 
the cross, with spikes through His feet, and instead of 
the Roman death cap He wears a crown of thorns. 
Greeks and other enlightened peoples are probably 
correct — the feet and legs bound with a cord. Roman 



90 Physical Life 

soldiers, best drilled of soldiers, allowed no rabble to 
interfere — with hootings and violence — against any of 
the three, rebels or outlaws; they were commanded to 
execute legally (?), in that trinity being Jesus. 

They also, (later than the Bible) give us some 
pointers to explain the Man of Sorrows, as also the 
Holy Ghost ( ?) for sacred Trinity. 

Listen to the song of the fire, — that element with 
water will' conquer all things physical on earth. So 
long as the blubber of the whale, and fat remains of 
the hybernating bear, we may expect a continuance of 
ordinary life. When the life elements are withdrawn, 
death of course follows. Ingenuity of man already 
thinks over the possibility of using central-earth fires 
for heat, to drive our machinery and cook our meals. 

Traditions have long existed, that the earth will be 
destroyed by fire or flood, just as we drown or cre- 
mate anything ; but that cannot occur wholly while the 
earth has life. Long before demise of our founda- 
tion — the earth — man, like rats on a sinking ship, will 
have fallen under the care of a later globe to mother 
us, so nature will have provided for the infant souls, 
late of the earth for heaven, to accept a new and 
greater home. 

As Father of us all will continue our provider, let 
there be increase of joy and not fear. Innumerable 
stars in our sky will as old earth offer all the souls of 
all our past, a home, a heaven again. 

The soul has had ever the instinct of self-preserva- 
tion, for back to our earthly beginning has been a like 
fear for humanity's beginning and ending — of a sud- 
den, fearful end thereof, of the earth. But really we 



And Higher Light 91 

have fearful plagues, wars, panics, even since general 
ignorance, worst of them all, is being well doctored. 

A. B. Cutner sings grandly of our beautiful "waters 
of life," may too give us tenfold more of poetic 
beauty to describe our hills and valleys, of holiest land- 
scapes. 

I want to go back to the rolling seas, 

The dark blue seas and the skies, 
Where the breakers roar on the wild seashore 

And the mad gale sighing flies ! 

I want to embrace in the speeding bark 

The rapture of watery main, 
While the billows play in its mighty sway 

With its thunderous, fierce refrain ! 

I long to go back to the crystal deep 

With its rainbows of pearl within, 
Where the mystic gloom slumb'ring weeds entomb, 

And disport gay mermaids in. 

I long to go back to the straying breeze, 

And the great sea's thundering tide, 
To the ocean's voice and the ocean's noise 

By the deep blue ocean's side ! 

I want to go back to the rolling seas, 

The dark blue seas and the skies, 
For, there I'll find my wandering mind, 

Where the raging hurricane flies ! 

Many find themselves — themselves to blame — even 
after many reincarnations, groveling yet and "down 
and out," wearing the fool's cap, maybe gold-embroid- 
ered ; the fool still uneducated in all the higher phases 
of life. Surely these are not fit for any orthodox 
heaven, when as proven they are unfit to live on our 
humble earth, — and behave themselves properly ! 

Out damned spot ! is the curse that Shakespeare put 



92 Physical Life 

in the mouth of a Scotchman, that would as well suit 
the cross-bearer everywhere. The murderer, the stig- 
matizer of the greatest of mortals, as the war-makers 
and conquerors; all those devoid of compassion and 
rather enjoying cruelties, else the Roman cross would 
never have been invented. Even the Primate of Man- 
kind, the last and greatest Jewish prophet, was stabbed 
by the iron nails of the cross to endure a lingering 
death. Jesus yet and evermore will live — his soul goes 
marching on, giving to millions rejoicing or hope, 
while proud and cruel Rome will soon be forgotten. 

IN MY DREAMS 

By Franklin H. Heald 

In my dreams a roguish boy 
Comes to me — in mydreams. 

He folds his little arms 
Around me — so it seems, 

And tells me how he loves me 
— in my dreams. 

In my dreams I of'times 
See him playing — in my dreams, 

Building houses with his 
"Gifts" and toys — so it seems, 

And he always builds "for papa" 
— in my dreams. 

In my dreams he writes me 
Little letters— in my dreams, 

Of how he longs to 
See me — so it seems; 

All his postscripts are sweet kisses 
— in my dreams. 

In my dreams I love 
To linger — in my dreams. 

Were it not for living 
Loved ones — to me it seems, 

I would not be awakened 
— in my dreams. 



And Higher Light 93 

EVELYN HOPE 

By Robert Browning 

Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead! 

Sit and watch by her side an hour. 
That is her book-shelf, this her bed ; 

She plucked that piece of geranium-flower, 
Beginning to die too, in the glass ; 

Little has yet been changed, I think: 
The shutters are shut, no light may pass 

Save two long rays through the hinge's chink. 

Sixteen years old when she died ! 

Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name ; 
It was not her time to love ; beside, 

Her life had many a hope and aim, 
Duties enough and little cares, 

And now was quiet, now astir, 
Till God's hand beckoned unawares, — 

And the sweet white brow is all of her. 

Is it too late then, Evelyn Hope? 

What, your soul was pure and true, 
The good stars met in your horoscope, 

Made you of spirit, fire, and dew — 
And just because I was thrice as old, 

And our paths in the world diverged so wide, 
Each was naught to each, must I be told? 

We were fellow mortals, naught beside? 

No, indeed ! for God above 

Is great to grant, as mighty to make, 
And creates the love to reward the love : 

I claim you still, for my own love's sake ! 
Delayed it may be for more lives yet, 

Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few: 
Much is to learn, much to forget 

Ere the time be come for taking you. 

But the time will come, — at last it will, 

When, Evelyn Hope, what meant (I shall say) 
In the lower earth, in the years long still, 

That body and soul so pure and gay? 
Why your hair was amber, I shall divine, 

And your mouth of your own geranium's red — 
And what you would do with me, in fine, 

In the new life come in the old one's stead. 



94 Physical Life 

I have lived (I shall say) so much since then, 

Given up myself so many times, 
Gained me the gains of various men, 

Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes ; 
Yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope, 

Either I missed or itself missed me : 
And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope ! 

What is the issue? let us see! 

I loved you, Evelyn, all the while ! 

My heart seemed full as it could hold ; 
There was place and to spare for the frank young smile, 

And the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold, 
So hush, — I will give you this leaf to keep : 

See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand ! 
There, that is our secret : go to sleep ! 

You will wake, and remember, and understand. 

One having ripe experience in the world might 
whisper to the devil that of two ways for destroying 
the human race — one selfishness, the other destruction 
of modesty and worth of womankind. While in all 
lower races the women were slaves, humanity was in- 
efficient, weak and every way in savagery. 

The church today, aristocratic, depends upon women 
help akin to her slavery. Acuteness, that amounts 
to other weaknesses of aristocracy, as Artemus Ward 
tells an experience of an emphatic showman who 
took advantage to show an eclipse for profit. He set 
up a tent open at the top, and harangued to folks on 
his front: "Chance to see an eclipse in all its glory. 
Admission ten cents only!" Others pursue "money- 
changing" in church like in the open-top tent, a wor- 
shipful place to see God ! ( He is within you. ) We 
all know that pure religion and undefiled, is as free to 
all as our glorious air. Why pay to see God or an 
eclipse ? 

We hear constantly from the feeble prophets, pre- 



And Higher Light 95 

dictions that the world would soon go up in smoke, 
be burnt. Others say at such and such a date, our 
footstool would be exceedingly moist! All from the 
Word of God. (Whose translation?) So the elect 
put on robes of righteousness, and on hilltops tire of 
waiting for the great event, appoint a new date, to 
have the ascension, one just like Elijah, Moses, Jesus ; 
but there is no room in heaven for chariots, horses, 
old clothes, etc., even with the tentative home in 
heaven located. Go and assist the next Elijah and 
others. Put teams under shelter — but only on earth; 
also pack, until next call, all robes. 

Our latest abuse of the blessed Book is to fill it fuller 
of miracles, world's ends, and foolish prophecies. 

Reincarnation in all of history's pages stands side 
by side with other theories. In the Christian dispen- 
sation are so many references. 

Christians fled in fear and sadness ; 
Jews were wrought to cruel madness ; 
Mary stood the cross beside. 

We have no truer account, in short, of that age of 
Jesus, than this Catholic hymn discloses. On the cross, 
amidst tortures, he had nothing to say against his 
cowardly followers — who so lately discussed their ex- 
pectations of rewards or promotions the highest at- 
tainable in that kingdom of the righteous they had 
poor comprehension of. Enemies of Jesus were 
divided, some of the established church; the others 
liars against the Prophet: that he desired an earthly 
throne as the conquering Romans had. 

The tortures so crazed Jesus, evidently, that he gave 
a helpless, desponding cry, "My God! hast thou for- 
saken me ! !" 



96 Physical Life 

It was well to call this greatest of sons the fore- 
runner, for the time had not arrived evidently for a 
spiritual era ; in fact, 2000 years passed later and the 
hell-hounds barked for "our rewards in heaven!" 
They for the glory of God were murdering, burning 
alive, or quartering infidels and witches. 

Among our feebler-minded or lazy calling them- 
selves the annointed — and what for? — who seat them- 
selves with aristocrats, dogs of war, etc., and live 
sumptuously upon church tithes, can be called modern 
Levites. "Walking on the other side," seeing no 
manly path of duty; and poor or helpless of us mor- 
tals they see not. I feel, we will have no churches 
of Christ and houses of gods to reckon with Good 
Samaritan worshippers, in the good time coming. 
Servants may become masters and well fitted for the 
places of command; then these fitter rulers may kick 
away those warring and expensive of the humankind 
now in power. Our beloved Lincoln was one of the 
lowly kind, and said, "God must love the poor, he 
made so many of us such." In the school of life, those 
of supreme intelligence may not be kept forever in the 
lower classes. 

Men and women of the shady class, night birds, 
soiled doves, gamblers who think the world owes 
them a living — which it does not; must in the new 
order be eliminated. Creatures in nature kill their 
drones, when the cruel necessity comes ; this their evo- 
lution as others surely "the voice of God." 

That eternal riddle, life and death, the here and the 
hereafter, are of more importance to all, old and 
young, than pleasing sights of movies, or sounds from 



And Higher Light 97 

gabfests in tavern or temple — as the saying is, these 
sounds come in at one ear and go out the other. When 
dying, the great Goethe exclaimed, "More light!" as 
evidently bursting from the hereafter it may be sur- 
mised. John Burroughs, dying lately, was not clear 
of the world, yet asked, "Are we near home?" I 
have a last photo of him — it should never have been 
taken — showing his uneasiness, almost his torture, as 
his last writings are forshadowings of. 

Lowell has an expression : "They met by chance in 
the usual way," in life yet and youth. Shakespeare 
said of his beloved mate, "Ann Hathaway, she hath 
a way "that he never would forget even in realms of 
the blest." 

So it is with all the living, love and sympathy 
deepens whenever we "sing of the brave and the true." 
Will we meet again? Surely, if we belong together in 
life and in death. One star only differs from another, 
in power, in glory. They all are found in star 
clusters — moons, habitable globes, and that center of 
light! 

A primate among the living of 2000 years ago gave 
us the key that is of the soul everywhere, "I give you 
a new commandment, love one another." 

We have almost forgotten this best of all sayings, 
that surely is the binding element in life. Our houses 
fit for gods are very stately, but those therein lack 
dreadfully that command of Jesus. In congregations 
you may begin at the doors to cut out the dead wood. 
Rulers of men, from Pope to Indian Chief, are more 
concerned over the tinsels and the monies, in this life 
of theirs, than anything that may pertain to that com- 



98 Physical Life 

mand to ruler and ruled I have quoted above. Ye 
thieves and those fallen among thieves, you await the 
Good Samaritan, alike as two peas you are to be! 

"Conscience doth make," says Shakespeare, "cow- 
ards of us all," and of all the most in need, those in 
authority. Ye who are principals should be servants, 
caretakers of those who need your care. If you were 
on the heavenly path and ready to sing as chanticler 
does after close of earth's night-time, then feel the 
joys of life, and of those little ones coming back to 
earth purified, surely you could and should preserve 
here that heavenly jewel, compassion. 

Here on earth, be not as the worms of the dust, 
loveless — for why a heaven for creatures pitiless? 
Words, mere words, mean little, and wealth less. 
When there must be ingathering, the good harvest, 
spread the bounties thereof. The earth surely is a 
good school. 

It seems that the great reborn, for a purpose are 
sent us in groups, in "star systems," I might say. 
Milton and Shakespeare; Lincoln and Grant. In Ro- 
man times, to checkmate the cruelties of the era came 
Jesus, greatest prophet of all time. Then democracy 
rose in its very earnestness. This republic of ours was 
the result of the great upheaval — by the people, for 
the people — and in two of the leading governments of 
Europe, kings were slaughtered; since, the slowed- 
down solemnities of the past, the aristicrats are as 
tame as rabbits. "Let us have peace," said Grant. 
A writer in N. A. Review says, "Neither Olympus nor 
Calvary (war nor religion) dominates the scene, for 
man is the great heir of both." So both have had their 



And Higher Light 99 

day of dominion, indolence, and extravagance that 
overburdened our time, and left mankind beggared in 
lands "flowing with milk and honey." 

Let us hope for another star group of immortals 
with powers to rebuild those civilizations that "pro- 
gressives" since have in digging for gold, ruined, made 
the lands deserts. Halt the fighting storekeepers that 
bring on world wars, so we may have world peace, a 
society free from sex suicide, etc., to weaken strongest 
of nations. 

But give me one clear hour at close of day, 

And whisper, as the darkling shadows fall, 
The names of friends I lost along the way, 
The faithful friends I can no more recall. 

And while their names upon my lips are set, 
Oh, speed the silent tides that I must stem, 

That ere again I slumber or forget, 
I may begin my eager quest of them. 

— L. Dodge. 

In this fervor for reunion in spirit we have an idea 
of rebirth akin and more real than those of earth 
wholly. Religion may still keep the key, the password, 
but dogmas about the infinite mystery must pass. 
Education makes us more and more at home in this 
world of progress, but for a well-balanced mind the 
need can be felt for a night of the soul, a higher land 
of delight, felt only in our dreams now and then. 
Passing to the new morn again for a coming day, by 
rebirth, society will have advanced as we get to ah 
age for appreciation. Wonders increase, souls in all 
homes with love and compassion as the religion of 
Jesus taught and to be understood later ; so this quiets 
our fears of hell and purgatory, man's inventions 



100 Physical Life 

surely; so we can, as the saying is, continue if neces- 
sary to pour oil on troubled waters. The world no 
longer a place of torture, a prison, but for real home 
life, and joys of nature we never before dreamed of. 

As Burroughs said, "satisfied with our earth." 
Whitman in his joy exclaimed, "I have positively ap- 
peared" — again ! 

A well known writer says : "I am pessimistic by 
night, but by day am a confirmed optimist, and it is 
the days that have stamped my life. I was born under 
a lucky star." May all thy rebirths be like unto this! 

Some murmur when their sky is clear 

And wholly bright to view 
If one small speck of dark appear 

In their great heaven of blue. 
And some with thankful love are filled, 

If but one streak of light, 
One ray of God's great mercy, gild 

The darkness of their night. 

— Richard Cheneviv Trench. 

All life is a school, a preparation, a purpose : nor can we 
pass current in a higher college, if we do not undergo the tedium 
of education in this lower one. — Author Unknown. 

"Nature is ourselves written large," says John Bur- 
roughs. I have dwelt upon some phases of early hu- 
manity, as exhibited by scriptural traditions, a species 
of ancient history. We shed past life, just as life 
ascends to higher light. 

On earth "in the beginning" may mean only back to 
savagery. Prof. Osterhout, studying our seaside kelps, 
found death always going on, as with life, the turn of 
the scales, he states, in turn break to mysterious life. 
As with vegetable life, the A, M, B, etc., to properties, 
say of the kelp; the cell means life, with elemental 



And Higher Light 101 

forces diminishing. But the foundation link which 
joins the organic with the inorganic elements, in all 
living forms, chloriphel in plants, and diatomic in ani- 
mal features, means the unthinkable spectacle — bridg- 
ing life and death. 

A slight change in the thermal condition of the 
globe, or some real flood of pernicious fluid, would 
sweep us all to the discard — and this may happen any 
moment — would happen if the creator was a mere 
divine of the proselyting order, with foolish cry of 
god, god ; me, me ! 

This would be far less cruel than has religion or 
Roman power inflicted, to say nothing about ferocious 
quarterings or body burnt alive because of "infidelity." 
To say this fair earth of ours is not good enough for 
the righteous, is rather laughable. If the Maker of 
heaven and earth made anything amiss, it was man- 
kind, if scriptures are truthful. But do not reckon as 
of the higher light the mere rushlight that humans 
hold up. 

Man, like the rest of all life, will be improved by 
every evolution, yea, by every rebirth. Prayers of the 
righteous availeth much in the way of directing atten- 
tion to future betterments. If we find that after a 
general hope in mankind there is sure comfort for 
death that evolution follows evolution, a theory of re- 
incarnation has no terrors, as death now with uncer- 
tainty. Whatsoever you may think of heaven, purga- 
tory and hell, the hope of coming to the old home 
land may be cheerful, may be joyous, as you will come 
as come all the living from a state of simplicity, and 
ignorance. 



102 Physical Life 

Philosophy and theology agree that matter is a 
coarseness as compared with spirit. See wheat grow 
up only with assistance of silica in the stalk. In the 
egg of every creature coming to life are the elements 
of body and spirit. In the body goes the earth's fer- 
tility fitted for spirit later, reincarnation. Life's en- 
velope contains the new letter of credit for both life 
and higher light. 

As I made reference, the first of life in the world 
was when one-cell particle of matter joined the one 
nearest of opposite sex, or polarity. Even dust hardly 
discernible has the quality of circular attachments to 
other particles of opposite polarity. This law con- 
tinues to the highest and greatest of aggregations, 
heavenly orbs and suns. Fish and other of the near- 
brainless creatures, cold-blooded, have only external 
contacts of polarity. The vulgarest of all creatures is 
mankind, with a literature filled with love gush and 
art with naked women and men — models. Whitman 
told me the poem he wrote to kill sex vulgarity was 
the very one that is loathed by all hypocrites and 
vulgar-minded. 

Mr. Heald lays much stress upon polarity of heat 
and cold. This twin force seems to move everything. 
In the earlier stage of our world, the oceans being 
warm and earth supercharged with fertility, the vege- 
tation was crowding and decaying, to accummulate for 
ages and ages coal, crude oil, etc. Showing that our 
present period is that of earth's sear and yellow leaf — 
autumn of the old man earth — he is beginning to exact 
extra clothing. Those of us not being minded of coal 
oil products and remnant of coal left us, are bethink- 



And Higher Light 103 

ing of getting nearer the sun. Nature will perform 
the operation — dissolve his cold remains in our sur- 
charged neighboring sun — then we will be warm ! 

The passage from suns to earths, to form all the 
globes of the heavens, is very like the spirit of all the 
living being reborn. 

There are honest rich men as there are dishonest 
poor, and vice versa. You see the profiteers making 
all kinds of lying promises, advertising tricks, so- 
called bargains, to call attention of those who imagine 
the greatest call is also the biggest bargain. Hence 
so many millions of dollars spent annually in very 
gaudy public advertising. Duplicity, dishonest trading, 
come of craftiness and selfishness, so called provident 
ones are also, maybe not honest ones of earth. "Bar- 
gains" turn the heads of the weak, — those Jesus came 
to succor as lambs he would hold. But ye would not. 
Souls differ of course, individually, and weak ones 
pass the Lake of God time and again but are not re- 
made — only purified. 

If anywhere in this essay the writer makes allusion 
to the Other Life — which no mortal can know — please 
lay this upon weakness of human nature training 
among story-tellers, mind-readers, spiritualists, preach- 
ers — all who work you for a fat living. Soothsayers 
all telling you about gods and higher abode you can 
get for so much at the agency on earth. 

Animals meek and harmless, or nearly so, are called 
wild beasts and monsters in all languages. This is far 
from truthful, and shows our unkindness and selfish- 
ness towards the little people. A lizard not longer 
than your foot is a gila monster. 



104 Physical Life 

Even an Ice Age has its uses, especially after rank 
growths in an age of wonderful vegetation. The great 
covering of water in form of ice will then give way 
to stretches freed from former deserts, and an age of 
coal and oil, accessible beneath or at surface of the 
ground. 

"Jesus set small store by charity. The philanthropy 
of almsgiving was to Him a mere cloak for the im- 
perfections and inequities of human relations. He put 
all the emphasis of His teaching and example upon 
justice and love. In a word where these prevailed 
charity would be unnecessary. We have traveled so 
far from the ideals of Jesus it is not easy to restore 
them. But there is no other way to find a permanent 
solution for the troubles that disturb us. His road is 
the only road. It involves sacrifice. We cannot avoid 
the cross. But beyond Calvary lies the realization of 
our hopes. — Chicago Post. 

The fool and his money are soon parted; abroad, 
the Wilhelms, Henrys and Georges nowadays kill no 
dragons, yet their proceedings cost the people billions 
in money and countless die in fear of blue-blooded 
autocrats such as these — bringing on costly wars. The 
churchly Pope and the financially poor were born 
exactly alike to all appearance. If I was born in an 
oven would I be a loaf of bread? asks the witty Irish- 
man. In one and all the tribes of man a spirit of 
nature rules. Scientists could not explain the concern 
of the get-rich-quicks how to convert other metals 
into gold, or how to secure the desired metal from 
sea water ; but an evil-minded man may handle mil- 
lions of our money, for his profiteering, to do the 



And Higher Light 105 

trick. How long will such tricksters have us at their 
mercy, or grabbers (even for charity money) keep 
begging "for Jesus" ? 

A well-balanced healthy life never tires of earth. 
That is more possible than might be surmised of the 
old heavenly vision of churchmen who sing over and 
over Glory to God in the Highest! Praise Him all ye 
Saints!! whatever said about (imagined) surround- 
ings, trumpets, golden streets, and the very sands are 
precious stones everywhere for everybody. The priests 
never look at nature, I presume, with trained eyes. 
John Burroughs loved the wild woods as nature al- 
ways has very beautiful and abounding life. John 
Muir loved the greater view of mountains, and all of 
us might exclaim at dying, as did Humboldt, Oh, for 
another hundred years ! 

Scientists may explain something of sunlight and of 
summer lightning, but these would be trifling things — 
of the earth, earthy, as compared with seizing upon 
inner light — that never was on sea nor shore. You 
may see movies to represent god Jupiter tossing up 
streaks of lightning, but this is not explaining elec- 
tricity, any more than I can in trying to tell you of a 
pure spiritual element, such as spiritualists ( ?) often 
try to be familiar with — knowledge of the unseen. 
Nearest the Greatest Prophet came to an explanation 
was, the kingdom of God is within you ! 

Sympathy plays a great part, but attraction of mes- 
merism has greater effect. Watch movements of 
birds, etc., in flocks. You note the oneness, the unity 
in movements. 



106 Physical Life 

Verses in Yale Review by C. M. Lewis, tell an old 
tale of a statue : 

Pygmalion paid no worship to the warm sun's dazzling beams, 

But shrined a dim ideal in the temple of his dreams. . . . 

The Cyprian Aphrodite heard the anguish of his call. 

Zeus frowned ; she heeded not ; and heard not, till too late, 

The slow relentless tolling of the iron bells of fate: 

She breathed into the ivory the breath of carnal life, 

And to a mortal dreamer gave his dream — to be his wife. . . . 

Unnatural, unspeakable, filled full the cup of fate, 

And one fair child, Adonis, last of Pygmalion's race, 

Avenged on Aphrodite her blushing act of grace. . . . 

For down here in the valley, secure from wind and weather, 

Is the true hearts' homing-place for me and mine together. 

Writing of life with the inner light of the impal- 
pable soul, is never anything practical — however some 
may believe in ghosts or "spirit forms." Shakespeare's 
line of divergence is I think correct, "from whose 
bourne no traveler returns." This conception I am ad- 
vocating, rebirth, for "Far down here in the valley, 
secure from wind and weather, is the true hearts' 
homing place for me and mine together." 

No truer conception I opine ever originated in 
Greece or elsewhere — entire separation of the Here 
and Hereafter. Lo heres and lo theres, like those of 
earlier days advocate going to heaven "with their boots 
on," very evidently not the true life and inner light. 

Kindness to the poor and lower animals results 
often in the harm done by visitors whose motive is 
the exercise of a dilettante virtue. It is more difficult 
to rejoice with those that do rejoice than to weep with 
those that weep ; for good fortune awakens envy, but, 
as has been shrewdly said, the misfortunes of our 
friends give us secret pleasure. While there can be no 
real kindness to others without sympathy, feelings of 



And Higher Light 107 

sympathy have, in themselves, no moral quality. With 
animals, "regard for others" terminates early; repro- 
duction and care of offspring are little more than in- 
stincts planted in the physical nature and needs of 
animals." 

If what is known as human lovemaking were only 
and truly holy, we would hear very little about divorce. 
Even birds mate without "catawauling" and so live 
as pairs mostly, throughout their lives. Isn't it at last 
recognized that God is everywhere? Are matches, 
marriages, made in heaven? A great question if the 
latter are not, as it would preclude divorces. 

Joaquin Miller is rated by an editor of L. A. Times, 
Mr. Ford, as the third great number of the Overland 
group. His was a free spirit, brooking no restraint, 
an impassioned nature instinct with the love of the 
primitive and of untrammeled life. Freedom he de- 
manded and freedom he achieved both in his life and 
in his poetry. Born in Indiana, he was brought to 
Oregon while yet a child. At fifteen he threw off all 
restraint, ran away from home, wandered from one 
California mining camp to another, and finally took 
up his life with the Indians. This was the life that 
he loved. He abandoned himself to it with all his 
ardor. So he was adopted by one of the tribes and 
married the chief's daughter, in true story-book style. 
But he was a nomad whom the Red gods called. So 
he packed his kit and trekked. Nicaragua, South 
America, Europe, the Orient, the Rockies, Alaska 
called him and thither he went, breathing deeply of 
the free air of romance and of advanture. 

His picturesque garb, with flannel shirt, flowing red 



108 Physical Life 

tie, high top boots, into which his corduroys were 
tucked, combined with his unshorn locks to make him 
the cynosure of all eyes when he was in England, and 
it was here that his verses first attracted marked at- 
tention. When he was at last ready to settle down it 
was on the hills back of Oakland that he built his 
cabin. Here he had the view of foothill, bay and 
ocean, ever changing and so ever new. 

His poems are mostly contained in "Songs of the 
Sierras," "Songs of the Sunlands" and "Songs of the 
Mexican Seas." Though highly individual in form, 
they have a free musical sweep, are full of color and 
of beauty and of the romance of the West. Unde- 
terred as they are in form as in thought they created 
a literary sensation and gave a new impetus to poetry. 
With Walt Whitman it may be justly said that Joaquin 
Miller enlarged the conception of verse both as to 
form and content." 

"Lord, Lord, when thou comest into thy kingdom, 
remember me !" It started with the first followers of 
Jesus, will continue while selfishness exists in man- 
kind. The Romans, most famous of human butchers, 
ceased conquering neighboring nations long enough to 
look out for the heavenly "rewards," becoming Chris- 
tians. Spain raised the Cross and blotted out civiliza- 
tion on the American continent. All Christian na- 
tions have yet wars and rumors of wars ; yet base their 
lamblike ethics upon him who had said, "Put up thy 
sword !" Ministers of Christ under whatever sect 
have claimed exclusive guardianship of the truth of 
God as it is in Jesus! None of these show more 
Christian resignation than did the late John Bur- 



And Higher Light 109 

roughs, whom churchmen do not accept in fellowship. 
He said: 

All serene I fold my hands and wait, 
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea ; 

I rave no more 'gainst time or fate, 
For lo ! my own shall come to me. 

Problems of good and evil — God and Devil — are 
oldest, yet freshest, that man has to deal with. It was 
in the Garden of Eden, yea, tree of life and its fruits. 
According to Paradise Lost, the great poem of Milton, 
this same problem was solved in heaven. 

When was beginning of earth, and when the close 
of its life, no human can guess aright. As we all have 
hopes of higher and better life, there may be in our 
rebirth, some better world for us. For the weak in 
any sense, mind or character, may be born into exist- 
ence lower down the scale, or tribulations somewhere 
met to complete us. "If I had life to live over again !" 
Surely you will always on your soul have the right 
"tab." 

Sometimes my Conscience says, says he, 
, "Don't you know me?" 

\ And I, says I, skeered through and through, 

. "Of course I do. 

i You air a nice chap ever' way, 

\ I'm here to say! 

_, You make me cry — you make me pray, 

And all them good things thataway — 

That is, at night. Where do you stay 

Durin' the day?" 

And then my Conscience says, onc't more, 
"You know me — shore?" 
"Oh, yes," says I, a-trimblin' faint, 
"You're jes' a saint ! 
Your ways is all so holy-right, 
I love you better ever' night 
You come around,— 'tel plum daylight, 
{ When you air out o' sight!" 



110 Physical Life 



And then my Conscience sort o' grits 

His teeth, and spits 

On his two hands and grabs, of course, 

Some old remorse, 

And beats me with the big butt-end 

O' that thing — 'tel clostest friend 

'Ud hardly know me. "Now, says he, 

"Be keerful as you'd orto be 

And alius think o' me !" 

— Riley. 



Seekers after truth, teachers and not preachers only, 
were at the time of Jesus located possibly in Greece or 
other countries favoring education. Solon gave as a 
truth, that until after death there can be no man called 
happy. Grecian thinkers made Harmony the touch- 
stone, for the soul's betterment. Socrates said man 
from his own fear of death, unprepared, reckoned the 
swan's song before dying a soul-cry of sorrow : his 
own actions, condemned to death by poison, shows the 
grandeur of a brave man going hence. He referred 
to Anaxagorus as applying himself to thoughts of re- 
birth in his meditations about life, and says this sage 
taught that mind is the cause and controlling power of 
the universe. Many were the theories rife in ancient 
times as to the universe, — some saying the earth was 
encompassed by a vortex, declaring heavenly bodies 
were held in orbital place — yet still the notion that our 
earth was flat prevailed. 



A few blest souls that clearly see the right, 

Who love the truth and have a steadfast will, 
Live life to do the right in love, not might, 

To seek the truth with zeal which naught can Still, 
To help those stumbling on life's rugged way. 

These are content for now to know in part, 
Because they inly feel that God bears sway, 

And peace, eternal peace, dwells in their heart 



And Higher Light 111 

The oldest road, 

And the craziest road of all; 
Straight it goes to the witch's shade 

As it did in the days of Saul ; 
And nothing has changed of the sorrows in store 
For such as go down on the road to Endor. 

The earth is yet a strange land to most of us; then 
why wish for any better? The songs of birds and in 
childhood with thy mother are surely sweetness of life. 
The scenery here is so entrancing that all the fancies 
of the most pious of artists have never pictured a 
heaven of hereafter with the sublime beauties and tints 
of earth. So let us all be content that we are here — 
and here maybe to stay at intervals ! Tarry in earth's 
grand scenery forever is the highest conception of 
bliss and beneficence — if we are beneficent! When I 
point to the doctrine of transmigration — not new — as 
return after death in a rebirth, it may be height of 
most heavenly desires — for Home, Sweet Home, is the 
greatest of songs for mortals, and to meet again a 
loving mother is sure haven in the highest point of 
bliss. Our scriptures, our society affairs, our greatest 
longings, fall far short of this hope of being again in 
father. 

God, Father, Maker, Ruler, are names of a higher 
force that must remain forever nameless in the spirit. 
Be content with blessings, and fulfill thy duty as duty 
comes along the Great Chain of Being, and no need 
for worship — except in every moment. To thine own 
self be true, here on earth and keep peace with all the 
living ! 

As an echo of times of religious persecution in 
France, I find this extract from a story by Gilbert 
Parker : 



112 Physical Life 

"To her the vesper bell was the symbol of tyranny 
and persecution. All that she had borne, all that her 
father had borne, the thought of the home lost, the 
name ruined, the heritage dispossessed, the red war of 
the Camisards, the rivulets of blood in the streets of 
her loved Rouen, smote upon her mind, and drove her 
to her knees in the forest glade, her hands upon her 
ears to shut out the sound of the bell. . . And a reve- 
lation seemed to have come upon her, and, for the 
first time, she was a Huguenot to the core. Hitherto 
she had suffered for her religion because it was her 
father's religion, and because he had suffered, and be- 
cause her lover had suffered. Her mind had been 
convinced, her loyalty had ben unwavering, her words 
for the great cause had measured well with her deeds. 
But new senses were suddenly born in her, new eyes 
were given to her mind, new powers for suffering to 
her soul." 

Religious intolerance does not apply to any one 
nation. England, Italy, Spain, Germany have shown 
the same hall-mark of aristocracy. Mohammedans 
and Eastern Christians have kept themselves poor try- 
ing to enforce certain doctrines upon those who dif- 
fered from them severally. As free as is America, the 
same intolerance prevails. The latest get-together are 
followers of Wesley, that church as others having in 
slavery times in this country agreed to part, because 
human bondage was approved of by Southern Meth- 
odists. The devil and the deep sea yawned; but as 
public morals and education advance, religionists at 
this later age of aristocratical failures has caused a 
stampede of churches to the side of freedom. In this 



And Higher Light 113 

age of Lincoln what miracles of common sense! A 
laughable combination — salvation and army — a con- 
cept to link God with Devil must go, or fighting Chris- 
tians have revival. 



How round gray arch and column lone 
The spirit of the Old Time broods, 

And sighs in all the winds that moan 
Along the sandy solitudes ! 

In thy tall cedars, Lebanon, 

I have not heard the nations' cries, 

Nor seen thy eagles swooping down 
Where buried Tyre in ruin lies. 

Nor watched in midnight's solemn time 
The garden where His prayer and moan, 

Wrung by His Sorrow and our Crime, 
Rose to ONE listening ear alone. 

have not kissed the rock-hewn grot, 
Where in His mother's arms He lay. 

Nor knelt upon the sacred spot 
Where last His footsteps pressed the clay 

Nor looked on that sad mountain head, 
Nor smote my sinful breast where wide 

His arms to fold the world He spread, 
And bowed to bless — and died! 



Speaking of spiritual impressions, inheritances, we 
approach an old theme, reincarnation. First of intel- 
lectual race inheritances seem of Greek or earlier 
origin. Belief in gods as souls of earthly heroes, was 
followed by the Druid concept of golden boughs (seen 
as spirit, not with the mortal eye), was in the Bible 
of the Hebrews recorded as fact in the priest's pres- 
ence of the unknown god, the vision. 

When the aircraft in use gets old-fashioned, the 
other, a still finer element, comes next to be exploited. 



114 Physical Life 

Already other waves in the wireless-message contriv- 
ance, is much in use. 

Air and electricity were long mysterious agents to 
early races of mankind. A god, Jupiter, is represented 
as above, handling the lightning ! Now that electricity 
is well in control by man, and air heavier than ether, 
we will require to go higher yet for latest experiments. 
"Heaven" will come next in our evolution, to get to 
the top ! Or we may be delving for heat toward earth's 
center ! 

Man sees where nature is blind ; he takes a straight 
cut where she goes far around. In him she has added 
reason to her impulse, conscience to her blind forces, 
self-denial to her self-indulgence, the power of choice 
to her iron necessity. How well she has done by man, 
man alone knows. How much he is dependent upon 
her, he alone knows; how completely he is a part of 
her, he alone knows. We may call man an insurgent 
in her world, as an English scientist does, but he is 
her insurgent ; she inspires him to insurrection and she 
puts his weapons in his hands. His cause is her cause 
and his victories are her victories. 

Only by personifying nature in this way and stand- 
ing apart from her and regarding her objectively, can 
we contrast her methods and her spirit with our own. 
The mother she has been to us becomes apparent. In 
spite of all her shortcomings and delays and round- 
about methods, here we are, and here we wish to 
remain." — John Burroughs in Yale Review, Jan., 1920. 

Our purpose in this book is to advocate the old 
theory, reincarnation, our return time and again to the 
physical life. It is no new belief for this progressive 



And Higher Light 115 

age, even the most devout among us believing in the 
doctrine that Jesus will be born again. So say we all ; 
the new birth giving this conjecture, as to whether 
we shall know each other? I might venture here a 
thought that if a family had been harmonious, will 
not part when the night called death passes over — as 
sure as day in the spirit; but the old names and old 
places are of the past, so only the spirit keeps alive. 

Jesus Christ, the Logos, the Divine Word, was a 
new revelation, though Plato had "longed for some 
divine word, if only it might be." To the Greeks and 
Jews the new phase of spirituality was a stumbling 
block, and the Prophet was crucified; but fortunately 
not all his teachings perished, as the new era had a 
means of preserving such writings as escaped censor- 
ing and burning by the priests. In a summing up of 
doctrines said to have been given the world by Jesus, 
there stands, a recent reviewer says, — simple home life 
with an atmosphere of love and truth and intelli- 
gence; where real life was not lost sight of and ob- 
scured by the then (church) refinements or atrophied 
by pleasures ; where ordinary needs and common 
duties were the daily facts : where God was a con- 
stant and friendly presence. The prophet, however, 
was being brought into the higher light — the spiritual 
phase of Being very far above divine miracles, lo- 
heres, and other claptrap. 

Cheer fulest of peoples it seems are races that long 
endured slavery, and now thank God (not man) for 
freedom. The Hebrews of old when captured and 
sent among vegetarians in the garden of Paradise 
region, had longings for the fleshpots of Egypt, the 



116 Physical Life 

old home. Scriptures recount their query, How can 
we sing the songs of Zion in a strange land? Cheer- 
fulness did not desert the race, howsoever attacks of 
homesickness. Vegetarian king of Babylon stirred 
their wit to remark, he "ate grass like an ox." 

Quick wit is not lacking with our Afro-Americans. 
Mrs. Pickett tells of Old Mose, ex-slave, who fished 
later for his sustenance along the James river. A New 
York visitor at the Pickett plantation asked Mose 
what price he received for diamond-backs? " 'Bout a 
dollar a dozen." "Why, at the New York hotels you 
can sell them at $10 apiece !" Mose, swelling up with 
fun, said, "You see dat bucket o' water; hit's wuf a 
million dollars — in hell !" 

Should church property be taxed is a question. All 
depends upon the use these properties are as public 
institutions. If tithes go into our public treasuries for 
public use then there is good reason to help the church 
members on the equitable plans for taxation. Take 
off taxes on houses of God, when taxation for the 
public use is not called charities, missions to foreign 
lands, etc., but for "our own use." 

Edisonally speaking, dear reader, did it ever occur 
to thee that the story of Jesus, Levite and Robber, 
might hint that these could be partners? One a lure 
for the other? Positive and negative as electricity in 
dark cloud, may not have active contact. Theology, 
with its purgatory, heaven and hell, is not teaching 
anything to the righteous other than heaven is our 
home — of a vast camp-meeting order. I would enlarge 
the place of joy at the home, to complete a circuit of 



And Higher Light 117 

life — the here attuned to the hereafter; from death, 
to rebirth; to death again. 

A few years ago in Europe the evil traits in man- 
kind became such that thievery and other deviltries 
were punished by sentence of death. Cruel, some may 
say, but it was a question of life in peace. The honey- 
producers, by destroying useless bees, the female 
working bee finding insufficient food could be gath- 
ered for the hive, determined on thus destroying 
drones. 

In sublime poem, Milton depicts Lucifer, like a mis- 
chief-maker, who started rebellion in heaven and was 
sent flying earthward bethought him of good busi- 
ness (for him) down amongst the Adamites; and 
straightforward he came to us. Between fights and 
frolics he was ever after in his glory on earth. His 
two weapons, laziness and war, did the business, sure, 
for us. His work has given us overloads of poverty. 
Paradise Lost, depicting the twin evils, is followed by 
this poet's Paradise Regained. Here is brought for- 
ward the Prince of Peace, the industrious carpenter — 
who builds up, as Lucifer tore down. Our glorious 
American, Lincoln, finding evil fruits of slavery every- 
where, keeping up the idle-rich at home, and in Europe 
and elsewhere a breeder of aristocrats — rich and idle 
classes, had by heroic endeavor to put down the war 
element of the home rebels, and their co-workers for 
slavery, in England and France. Noblest endeavor of 
any mortal in history. A writer says : 

"Should you be able to persuade others to follow 
your lead, and rank all work by its usefulness rather 
than by its gentility, you would accomplish a much 



118 Physical Life 

needed reform. Gentility is the most worthless pos- 
session in the world. Thousands have starved for it, 
and thousands more have lived cramped, forlorn lives 
because they worshipped at its shrine." 

In all the years of my observation of the beavers 
and their ways I never knew of them being caught 
short on their winter's feed, unless it was a case where 
the ruthless hand of man brought distress on them by 
cutting out their dams or destroying their houses in 
mid-winter. The first work on their dams usually 
commences about the middle of September, in North 
Dakota. They first go to the dam breasts and do a 
little repairing with mud and twigs, after which they 
dredge out or dig any canals the situation of the hour 
would warrant. By this time the old weather prog- 
nosticators had cast their horoscope for signs of the 
coming winter, and whatever the result, action fol- 
lowed. If severe cold snaps were expected early, work 
on the dams stopped for the time that all hands could 
commence cutting down and draging in their willow 
brush and tree-tops before ice formed in their water 
slides which would bother and retard them, getting 
their food in shape for winter storage. A winter with- 
out snow in the fore part of it, means water exposed 
to hard freezing weather, and as a consequence thick 
ice that will freeze deep down in the beaver's feed bed 
and give them much trouble the balance of the winter, 
if the same cannot be avoided. This is the reason that 
from warnings of a snowless winter the beavers raise 
the breasts of their dams from one to two feet higher 
than in winters that they expect a heavy snowfall in 
the earlier part. Long cold winters can be forecasted 



And Higher Light 119 

by an intelligent observer of beavers' ways by noting 
an extra large feed bed and the extreme care that they 
use in replastering their houses ; the work on the latter 
being usually completed by the first days of October." 

The above quotation from Joseph H. Taylor's book 
on The Beaver indicates how the white man — with civ- 
ilization — ruins any fair realm. Killing inhabitants, 
not only red brethren but wild animals ruthlessly. 
In destroying beavers alone, large tracts along our 
streams were deprived of moisture, made desert. Kill- 
ings have robbed our native wilds of countless crea- 
tures that in former- times had the forests, now de- 
stroyed, to live thereunder in all peace and security. 

We have neither to curse our gods nor to praise 
them; neither to do penance nor to offer burnt offer- 
ings (food for priests), but only to take and use wisely 
the gifts bestowed upon us. 

There are neither skeptics nor atheists in regard to 
nature and the true God. He can exist in the higher 
place and can never be changed. God is as many- 
sided as nature is. The savage and merciless aspects 
of nature are of Him also — in the jungles of Africa 
as well as in the walks of culture and refinement; in 
the destroying tornado as well as in the gentle summer 
breeze; in the overwhelming floods as well as in the 
morning dews, says John Burroughs. 

Dogs of war, conquerors, are first in war, last in 
peace. Next to this very evil element come distress- 
ful millions of their victims, and hordes of profiteers. 
Money as exchange symbol is not evil, assuredly; but 
when the rogues and idle rich get hands on it, then it 
is linked with evil and can do no good. Idleness is 



120 Physical Life 

an accursed evil — has no place in nature. We see mo- 
tion everywhere — in the heavens and every portion of 
animated being. Honey bees will take the lives of 
their drones (males) when scarcity of food is theart- 
ened on years flowers are scarce. 

Exclusively blessed ones, biblical to the core, are 
now, they say, near the era of the Second Coming of 
Jesus; or they to meet him above with their robes on. 
They never die! "Remnant, — true believers now liv- 
ing," says our local publication, Messiah's Coming 
Kingdom, "should first go through the shadow of His 
death, burial and then the reality. We should be sown 
or buried, a natural body, and then be raised a spir- 
itual body. But provision is also made for a company 
in the last days of the dispensation who are not to 
pass through the grave, but are to be changed. We 
undoubtedly are living in that time, and no true be- 
liever should think of death or the grave, but strive 
to be among the overcomers. Some have honestly 
taken the stand that if all believers during the gospel 
age had been sufficiently strong in faith they might 
have escaped the grave and been with us today. After 
this the Son of man is revealed sitting upon a white 
cloud, and forthwith the harvest of the earth, or gen- 
eral ingathering of surviving Christians, is reaped by 
him. As soon as the 144,000 sealed ones are securely 
caught up to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, 
the heavenly Jerusalem, straightway there goes forth 
an angel, representing a body of preachers and jour- 
neys through the midst of heaven with the everlasting 
gospel. The immediate and final sequel is the treading 
of the winepress at the battle of Armageddon, when 



And Higher Light 121 

s 

the incorrigible are crushed in the vintage of God's 
wrath. Thus terminates the description of the five 
years of the second advent of Christ, including the 
translation of the first-fruits-Christians at its begin- 
ning, and of the harvest-Christians at its close. God's 
word plainly states that a woman must not be "al- 
lowed to teach or usurp authority." We know of no 
better way for preachers to use their tithing money 
than in literature bringing light and truth. The Lord 
will touch your heart to give, but you must do the 
giving. The finances of the editor are very meager." 
This is not different from condition of other poor 
editors than Brother Miller. But why be concerned 
about money at so terrible, so prophetic, so pathetic a 
time of catastrophe! 

Before Lincoln reached his acme of achievement, 
we heard he was too common to be great, and looked 
like a baboon. Socrates, greatest of the Grecians, was 
a "corrupter of youth" through his queer doctrines, 
for his judges were found, to condemn him to death 
by poison. Omar Khayyam was called a drunken 
loafer, an infidel. Even Jesus was scoffed at as a hobo, 
mere carpenter in Nazareth — especially was he an in- 
fidel deserving all the agonies of slow torture on the 
cross. 

We hear all kinds of complaints as did Job, of 
trobles and vexations in living — the chief villain (as 
playgoers say) was Maker and Moving Cause of all 
life's activities. Job trusted things would move bet- 
ter by-and-by. A beneficent One sends to earthly 
existence once and oftener as to a house furnished: 
here in Los Angeles if the human animal is dissatis- 



122 Physical Life 

fied, dirty, negligent, and howling about better treat- 
ment, he must move or pay rent and "no children per- 
mitted." 

Human nature in the days of Jesus was much the 
same as today. We have missions abroad and pulpits 
rilled, by those of the Levite order; we have true re- 
formers doing work without money and cheerfully 
doing their best. Jesus scornfully points to the Levite 
as passing on the other side — of trouble, of serious 
calls to help a brother. How will it be possible to 
build up the old aristocratical institutions, by aristo- 
crats themselves, the help ! help ! yelpers. They follow 
advice of the poet, "Donit thou marry for money, but 
go where money is." 

Evolution is a fact, as we see in growth everywhere. 
Not only do the creatures of earth change, but the 
earth itself ages. Single lifetimes are mysterious, for 
many small things among those living about us have 
their tadpole-frog or earlier changes of form. The 
bee has progressed so far as to control progeny — the 
atrophied female can be seen destroying males of the 
hives, — one pair (sex) doing the office of hundreds of 
individuals. The worst enemies we have among 
worms and the like, are those underground breeders, 
coming up at stated intervals like our seventeen-year 
locusts and the army worm, that in their last of trans- 
formations to the perfect state will overrun acres and 
destroy every bit of the vegetation. Farmers may get 
control of this over-breeding mania when his own kind 
require no more divorcing. In old time the greater 
the power a chief or holy man had, the more were his 



And Higher Light 123 

"concubines." Thanks to increase in education the 
chief can no longer control the woman. 

It will bear examination, the statement that convicts 
have sharper — more cunning — intelligence than the 
general population, but lack much of pity. You find 
in little depredators as mice (and not their fault) in- 
telligence suited to their size, as that governing hu- 
man crooks, the latter in polarization all wrong. Make 
better traps to catch the big ones. It does not make 
for hardening of youth to great extent, catching the 
"innocent" lice and mice. It will not likely make us 
less in innocence, destroying humans possessed of bad 
instincts, than to be carefully eliminated, for these 
negative ones only live to study how to "get you" who 
are on the side of innocence. 

There was a recent case of a citizen "being born 
again" after eight years of silence as in a grave. A 
Denver mute — dumb, blind and paralyzed in every 
limb, so helpless that it was necessary to feed him by 
means of a tube through his nostrils, unable to feel, 
smell or taste or even to think, to all intents and pur- 
poses unconscious, Luther Dionne was carried into the 
county hospital. Now he can point out the town of 
his birth, and with a pencil he can print, laboriously, 
the name of the village. 

"Would'st thou the young year's blossoms and the fruits of its 
decline, 
And all by which the soul is charmed, enraptured, feasted, fed, 
Would'st thou the Earth and Heaven itself in one sole name 

combine ? 
I name thee, O Sakuntala ! and all at once is said." 

— Goethe. 

Main purposes in this book will be to promote joys 
of home, and of peace. These are surely more in the 



124 Physical Life 

way of hope and sure expectancy than is a heaven in 
belief only. The physical love of life here, are our 
vital purposes always. From Henry IV in Shake- 
speare, I copy, the dramatist glorying at end of a war : 

I like them all, and do allow them well, 

And swear here by the honor of my blood, 

My Father's purposes have been mistook; 

And some about them have too lavishly 

Wrested His meaning and authority. 

My lord, these griefs shall be with speed redressed; 

Upon my soul they shall. If this may please you, 

Discharge your powers into their several counties, 

As we shall ours, and here between the armies, 

Let's drink together friendly and embrace, 

That all their eyes may bear these tokens Home 

Of our restored Love and unity 

The word of Peace is rendered, — hark how they shout! 
A Peace is of the nature of a conquest — 
For then both parties nobly are subdued 
And neither party loses ! 

The human family seems never satisfied with earth, 
being of such covetous nature. Self-preservation — 
hustle — influenced our races from very earliest times. 
Man wants to go faster, imitating spirit, that travels, 
Plato says, from Here to There without lapse of time, 
or any pain. When airplane or under-sea crafts tire 
him, he will seek further knowledge of the earth's in- 
terior, or further, seeking universal schemes toward a 
heaven ! But "heaven" is within him. How pitying 
he is "to the man sitting in darkness" ; some other sort 
of civilization, or medicine, he must take. We get 
farther away from health and undefiled religion every 
century , and when innocent, childlike nations are used 
up — how we all will be as like as two peas ! 

Prescott's Conquest of Peru relates : The Spanish 
were nearly mad with joy at receiving these brilliant 



And Higher Light 125 

tidings of the Peruvian city. All their fond dreams 
were now to be realized, and they had at length reached 
the realm which had so long flitted in visionary splen- 
dor before them. . . . "It was manifestly the work 
of heaven," exclaims a devout son of the church, "that 
the natives of the country should have received him in 
so kind and loving a spirit, as best fitted to facilitate 
the conquest ; for it was the Lord's hand which led him 
and his followers to this remote region for the exten- 
sion of the holy faith, and for the salvation of souls, 
. . . . Having now collected all the information 
essential to his object, Pizarro, after taking leave of 
the natives of Tumbez, and promising a speedy return, 
weighed anchor and again turned his prow towards the 
south. Still keeping as near as possible to the coast, 
that no place of importance might escape his observa- 
tion, he passed CapeBlanco, and, after sailing about a 
degree and a half, made the port of Payta. The in- 
habitants, who had notice of his approach, came out in 
their balsas to get sight of the wonderful strangers, 
bringing with them stores of fruits, fish and vegeta- 
bles, with the same hospitable spirit shown by their 
countrymen of Tumbez. 

Repeatedly they saw structures of stone and plaster, 
and occasionally showing architectural skill in the exe- 
cution, if not elegance of design. Wherever they cast 
anchor they beheld green patches of cultivated country 
redeemed from the sterility of nature, and blooming 
with the variegated vegetation of the tropics; while a 
refined system of irrigation, by means of aqueducts 
and canals, seemed to be spread like a network over 
the surface of the country, making even the desert to 



126 Physical Life 

blossom as the rose. . . . On his way, he touched 
at several places where he had before landed. At one 
of these, called by Spaniards Santa Cruz, he had been 
invited on shore by an Indian woman of rank. . . . 
Pizarro found that preparations had been made for his 
reception in a style of simple hospitality that evinced 
some degree of taste. Arbors were formed of luxuri- 
ant and widespreading branches, interwoven with 
fragrant flowers and shrubs that diffused a delicious 
perfume through the air. A banquet was provided, 
teeming with viands prepared in the style of the Peru- 
vian cookery, and with fruits and vegetables of tempt- 
ing hue and luscious to the taste, though their names 
and nature were unknown to the Spaniards. After 
the collation was ended, the guests were entertained 
with music and dancing by a troop of young men and 
maidens simply attired, who exhibited in their favorite 
national amusement all the agility and grace which 
the supple limbs of the Peruvian Indians so well quali- 
fied them to display. Before his departure, Pizarro 
stated to his kind host the motives of his visit to the 
country, in the same manner as he had done on other 
occasions, and he concluded by unfurling the royal 
banner of Castile, which he had brought on shore, 
requesting her and her attendants to raise it in token of 
their allegiance to his sovereign. . . . He took with 
him gold, some of the natives, as well as two or three 
llamas, various nice fabrics of cloth, with many orna- 
ments and vases of gold and silver, as specimens of the 
civilization of the country, and vouchers for his won- 
derful story." 

Has Spain received glory and wealth to yet endure 



And Higher Light 127 

the inroads of time? Even at our time of greater 
civilization, only one nation (our own), has published 
any desire to quit robbing weaker nations. Still 
Pizarro methods predominate! 

Our American poet, Whitman, personifying the 
Soul says : 

"O, vapors ! I think I have risen with you, and 
moved away to distant continents and fallen down 
there, for reason; I think I have blown with you, O, 
winds! O, waters, I have fingered every shore with 
you. All forces have been steadily employed to com- 
plete and delight me. Now on this spot I stand with 
my robust soul, etc. Hands of the sisters, Death and 
Night , incessantly, softly wash again and ever again 
this soil'd world." 

"When once," Bacon says, "the mind has placed be- 
fore it noble aims, it is immediately surrounded — not 
only by the virtuous, but by the gods." This is evo- 
lution. 

Jesus says, "To him that hath shall be given." 

Plato affirms that "the soul is wholly immortal, and 
when it is removed from this spot, it is there without 
pain; so it must needs be, Axiochus, if you have lived 
piously, you will be happy either below or above." 

Confucius says, "The glory and tranquillity of a 
state may arise from the excellence of one man. If a 
man love others, and no responsive attachment is 
shown to him, let him turn inwards and examine his 
own benevolence." 

"The stern behest of duty, 

The doom-book open thrown, 
The heaven ye seek, the hell ye fear, 
Are within ourselves alone." 

— Whittier. 



128 Physical Life 

Franklin H. Heald ,in his theory of the procession 
of planets, has reasoned out his case from facts, with- 
out any tendency to mysticism. 

Early Hebrews believed in their Burning Bush, and 
in ancient times idol worship and ghost-seeing indi- 
cated there was evidence of this unknown force of 
light. Shakespeare in his great tragedy, "Macbeth," 
gave this unexplained something both the knocking 
power (at the gate), and the visions. 

Spectrum analysis shows the same elements as our 
sun, for the earth and all other bodies. A more search- 
ing knowledge will some day follow on the spiritual 
side of light. 

The war now ended will give us a new era. Prus- 
sianism and Priestcraft must go ! and then the lowly 
Jesus, the leveler of old, will come into His own. De- 
spised, forsaken, crucified, this representative of re- 
publicanism moved among the publicans and others, 
His true mission never wholly revealed, even when 
the new religion had later sprung up to do Him pious 
honor. His fabled Samaritans, Levites and Magda- 
lenes will now be better interpreted. Woman is free 
now to live, and no longer must be slavish burden 
bearer or bearer of children, — as her only "spheres." 

Our palaces of kings and houses of God or gods 
will be turned to better use, to poor houses, maybe, so 
that the halt and blind and poor will have veritable 
refuges at last. Every human being must, as Bunyan 
said of the tub, "stand on its own bottom." Church 
and state tyrannies must go. Less than 300 years ago 
John Bunyan in Merry England was kept 13 years 
in Bedford jail for preaching in a private residence; 



And Higher Light 129 

indicted as "a person who devilishly and perniciously 
abstained from coming to church." And he the 
author of Pilgrim's Progress and other pious and ever- 
popular books ! 

George Fox of the same period and region as Bun- 
yan, for preaching the gospel, was seized — by law — 
and robbed of his goods, and often sent to noisome 
jails. His followers in the Society of Friends, to the 
number of hundreds, were ruthlessly mobbed, jailed, 
or murdered. 

Shakespeare's "Seven Ages of Man" would indi- 
cate our earthly personal evolutions, almost as marked, 
one from the other, as the final one here, the Great 
Adventure. 

As sunlight may carry all the materials to make up 
worlds, why should not "Light that never was on sea 
nor shore" carry souls, — life; — and cannot this better 
part of all animate creation, after rest at the center, 
go again into motion beyond, — attracted by the loved 
souls gone before; or, to go again into outer realms? 
The new-born babe holds forth the hands to grasp the 
beloved one, — so we should approach the finite or in- 
finite, our best beloved. 

"Lead, kindly Light," that lighteth everyone upon the 
earth. .The Guide will not turn from Light to Dark- 
ness in either direction making the procession — the 
evolution. George Fox, in his homely phrase, said, 
"Mind the Light !" Another meaning than the one he 
intends, we may indicate here : Mind is the channel 
of all reunion, Finite with Infinite. 

You can always discern the difference between a 
"miracle" worker and the true minister of Jesus, for 



130 Physical Life 

the former makes ready advances to get your money, 
and the latter is true to his teacher in the spirit will 
"render unto Caesar the things that are honestly Cae- 
sar's, and unto God the things that are His." 

"A servant is worthy of his hire," says the trickster. 
As no man "can find out God," no man can be hon- 
estly hired by Him. Work ye for the well-being of all 
in Life — do it in the spirit of love and compassion. 

This auto, aero, and movie generation has much 
more of frivolity than had that generation before it. 
In 1653 George Fox of England devised a very sim- 
ple but solemn marriage ceremony. After a young 
couple had attended his (Quaker, and very solemn) 
meetings and announced there their intentions of mar- 
riage, at last came the meeting place ceremony, with 
a personage of the law present as recorder. They, 
standing before the assembled Friends, say, as Richard 
Roe, who, taking Mary Doe by the hand, said: "In 
presence of our friends assembled, I take to be my 
wedded wife — promising, with Divine assistance, to be 
unto her a loving and faithful husband, until death 
shall separate us." Then the woman (with only "hus- 
band" omitted, and "wife" inserted), repeats the 
promise. 

This is a very practical age, in a well-governed re- 
public. Before the Jewish nation succumbed 2000 
years ago, poverty was general, for, after paying 
the tithes, 10 per cent, on incomes, the people must 
raise taxes for government purposes. The tithe went 
to autocratic religious extortioners — hirelings in name 
only, as they lived in great comfort. This class had, 
before they killed Jesus, to bear much ridicule and 



And Higher Light 131 

some violence from Him, the free prophet, or "out- 
law." As the Bible says, Jesus scourged them, and 
His way of treating "the Levite priest" is of record. 
God-hirelings, so-called, are today our citizens with- 
out regular employment. The citizens assist them, 
aside from the exaction of ten per cent, in money 
raised by tithes from parishioners for them to use. 
If they go abroad to the "men sitting in darkness," 
they are, on return here, well healed, yet helpless in 
regard to public duties. As our poor need assistance, 
this class of the community should be publicly en- 
rolled and be made to work. They were of public 
school education (also theological schools or Bible in- 
stitutes), so could be of great help to the public. 
Mothers everywhere are overburdened by care and 
work, so why not turn all agents of God, so-called, 
into By-the-Sweat-of-the-Brow class? I have a niece, 
a doctor with Presbyterian missions in Arabia, and the 
wealthy sheik of the region encourages her in different 
ways — imploring her to help his downtrodden people 
— but asks her to be among them not as a missionary. 

Authority is the thing to scare you out of your 
boots, be you ever so innocent of wrong-doing. A snip 
of a British officer, leading his crowd of armed over- 
whelmed near Bunker Hill, got his soldiers into a bad 
mix, captured by our Continentals. Our sturdy Revo- 
lutionary general was being browbeaten by the haughty 
captive chief, who roared out, "By what authority?" 
The answer of our patriotic general was "By authority 
of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress." 
This is the best, the most pat, and enduring answer to 
aristocracy that could be made. It was good before 



132 Physical Life 

the days of Putnam; it is good today. The same 
blatant cry of authority, religious, strength of arm, or 
trickery, can turn up the rottenest element to rest on 
the surface of affairs — with stench, with abuse, with 
money (or God's authority (!) no one with intelli- 
gence would obey. 

The insolence was crowded back in our Revolution, 
and today we hope will be alike successful whenever 
an unauthorized (by the people) set of rulers attempt 
government. The like fate will be meted out to science 
or religions attempting to override the common sense 
of a common people. 

It appears from tradition Jesus was a fighter for the 
right, as shown in a fight He had with money changers 
in the temple. Today we have perplexities in belief, 
yet with education and science now, the mystery busi- 
ness (miracles, etc.), mildly turn to movies, acrobats 
in the air springing securely across voids from one air- 
plane to another; and the ouiji board that crazes many 
who are looking for some hokus pokus from spirits. 
All have trace of a brain weakness that comes from 
use, generation after generation, of rum, tobacco or 
opium mostly. Systems are also weakened physically 
from private diseases and poisons. Paradise Lost 
might be rewritten, and as Quaker Thomas Elwood 
suggested to his friend John Milton once, "Thee 
should tell us of a paradise found." If Jesus by re- 
birth comes to earth, as religionists oft aver He will, 
we may expect a still more elevated poem than that of 
blind Milton. 

We begin to learn of true mysteries of sky and plan- 
ets, and suns ; and when more writers can follow John 



And Higher Light 133 

Burroughs in telling us of the real life of bird or ani- 
mal, the earth should attract all attention, long diverted 
to a heaven of the Loheres. Then will we have a tith- 
ing for human knowledge not yet attained, that is far 
above gold and rubies. Then, possibly, will be seen 
spirits (I think not), in nature aside from all the crea- 
tures returning here by a rebirth. The grandeurs and 
endless variety in nature here is surely above any con- 
ceptions of a golden, trumpeting, hallelujah resting 
place for spirits — only spirit; unseen forms. (No 
trumpets, no mouth to sing.) "The kingdom of God 
is within you," was a fitting expression of Jesus, when 
we can keep thoughts above any concepts of kings, 
priests, or any pleasures of society, past or present. 
We are not longer worshipping mere idols of dead 
men in this age of equal rights, equal privileges, caring 
not what any boss may think about this and that. 

Venerate the Scriptures, in the saying, "If we go to 
the uttermost ends of the earth," there is the God of 
law and order. (In the old times, possibly, the earth 
had ends, but now it is round as a ball.) "How can 
we sing the songs of Zion in a strange land?" Thou 
needst not, for in thy everlasting garb of the spirit, 
there is no strange land. "I sent my soul into the in- 
visible, the after-life, to tell; and it returned to me 
and said, Thou, thyself, art heaven and hell." God is 
everywhere. Why wish to meet Him in bliss (heaven) 
if thou wilt live in peace and happiness? 

As a soldier, going over the top with an unloaded 
gun, would mean want of discretion or wilfulness, so 
you must in this world have a trained will. If you 
take to flight in an airplane, and have the ocean or 



134 Physical Life 

mountain to cross, then you find a trained will essen- 
tial. 

If a young person of either sex contemplates mar- 
riage, then an age of selfishness — ice cream and candy 
era — must be abated. This most essential period 
reached, selfishness must be thrown out of your then 
high flights of fancy. The pilot of an airplane would 
not need a better trained will than yours should be to 
steer you on a true course. Lay low, and think ! Call 
up a trained will power to command or to your need. 
You will truly seek then that power within — the in- 
stinct guiding all animal life. For if the mate, chosen 
with a care the bird shows in preparation for nesting, 
has met the crisis with like care, you can go ahead 
knowing all is well. 

Man's a little chunk of ice ; 

Woman is the Sun ; she lets 
Herself beam on him. How nice 

And soft he gets ! 

A person who loves ease, and yet counts upon a re- 
birth that will still keep him among the slothful high- 
ups, will be much surprised, maybe, to find that his 
soul has, like the ass's skin in the story, grown in- 
finitesimally small, to be brought again into reincarna- 
tion amidst his equals, the sloths or monkeys. What a 
hullabaloo was raised when Huxley and others proved 
that man and monkey have the precise skeleton in 
every bone! 

We had returned to us of earth, a century ago, when 
our republic was endangered, such grand men as Lin- 
coln and Grant, just in the nick of time as the saying 
is. While great souls are sent as needed to rebirth, 



And Higher Light 135 

the lower world of wild creatures will have souls also 
sent. Those humans bfore tried and found wanting, 
possibly, will appear in families of monkeys or sloths. 
The devil takes the hindermost, is a common saying. 

Related to immortality seems that almost invisible 
element protozoa. After its host's death this continues 
its life, almost formless, in the dead body. Cycle of 
life at first passes six stages from fertilization until 
leaving the egg form. Oxygen seems of primal use, 
as use of ai ris our last hold or want of hold upon life. 

It is crass conceit to say you know the world, for 
throughout countless lives of creatures you cannot 
even see so many of microscopic smallness. You only 
see a few of the larger forms in all the kingdoms of 
nature. Thus you can pass away from earth, and 
again return to the first stage, ovum, the spirit return- 
ing rejuvenated after death (soul sleep) to again reach 
the middle of life's stage. 

Ignoring the opposite pull of polarity might destroy 
hell. As well try to write hot and cold into a com- 
promise unit. When a Higher Light illumines, there 
comes the Christ spirit, and later our Elder Brother, 
Jesus. The age we live in is not Christian, if that 
means being on the side of right to any great extent. 

Evolutions have brought us out of savagery; they 
will lead us to God (good). Jesus gives no account 
of heaven, no assurance of our fitness for it, only of 
home concept. 

A Quaker poet, Whittier, whose ancestors were so 
maltreated for heresy in the Puritan days, is now ac- 
counted a Christian guide and an honored hymn- 
writer, all denominations honoring him. Another be- 



136 Physical Life 

liever in voices, the Maid of Orleans, was burned at 
the stake as an infidel at behest of a bishop, who, 
Judas-like, betrayed the savior of France to her Eng- 
lish foes. Puritan cruelties exercised against old 
women martyrs — so-called witches — show a big blot 
in our history. And but for. educated thinkers we 
would yet have a dark age — kaisers thirsting for plun- 
der and power, and fanatics stirring up all kinds of 
disorders. 

Let us follow the teachings of Jesus and other com- 
passionate democrats. There is a general belief in 
churches that the Comforter will again be reborn on 
earth, so that I may presume to say the theory of re- 
birth, as old as sun-worship, maybe, will bear in time 
good fruit. 

THE OPEN ROAD 

By C. B. Dodge 

The open road lies out to the hills, 
Where the cares will find you not; 

Each turn of road brings a vista new 
Of a quiet sylvan spot. 

And the song of the thrush is ringing, 

Oh, a wonder song thou art! 
And a solace comes in the woodland, 

And quiet steals to the heart. 

Then it's leave behind the noisy town, 

Where the cares and worries be, 
To wander far o'er the open road 

To the land of leaf and tree! 

Oh, world, the wealth of life and love 
Breathes out from thy primal sod; 

The open road lies out to the hills, 
And that highway leads to God! 



And Higher Light 137 

"It is not easy to hear and apply to one's self the 
exhortations of preachers who, aloft in the pulpit, 
seem to be carrying out a mere formality; it is just 
as difficult to escape from the appeals of a layman 
who walks at your side," says Sabbatier, author of 
the Life of Saint Francis. The latter was more the 
recluse, camper in the woods, than preacher. Deeds, 
not words, as this great man did his work principally 
for the poor, and his friends, the birds and other lowly 
creatures. 

A man who worries over his own soul and to con- 
vert others, as did the fanatics about 1212, when send- 
ing abroad into the region of Jerusalem defenseless 
children. The little ones were ruthlessly slain, or 
taken by enemy soldiers, to spend the rest of their lives 
in slavery, and homeless. This was far and away 
from the religion of Jesus the compassionate. In Eng- 
land, likewise, the poor were neglected and downtrod- 
den by worthless priests and rulers, until a friend of 
the poor, Robin Hood, made havoc among the idle 
rich churchmen. 

Jews, Christians, Mohammedans, slaughtering each 
other, for ages, and all other wars, upon unbelievers 
or enemies, must cease, or compassion such as Jesus 
taught ,and education fosters, must go to the discard 
and we go back to savagery! 

Ovid, the Roman poet, speaking of Pythagoras as 
his interpreter, says : "Our bodies, too, are changing 
always, and without any intermission, and tomorrow 
we shall not be what we were or what we are now. 
And, believe me, in this universe so vast, nothing per- 
ishes; but it varies and changes its appearance, and 



138 Physical Life 

to begin to be something different from what it was 
before* is called being born; and to cease to be the same 
thing is to be said to die. Whereas, perhaps, those 
things are transferred hither, and these things thither, 
yet ,in the whole, all things ever exist." 

As Pythagoras was considered to have pursued 
metaphysical studies more deeply, perhaps, than any 
other of the ancient philosophers, Ovid could not have 
introduced a personage more fitted to discuss these 
subjects. Having traveled through Asia, it is sup- 
posed that Pythagoras passed into Italy, and settled 
at Crotona ,to promulgate there the philosophical prin- 
ciples which he had acquired in his travels through 
Egypt and Asia Minor. 

The Pythagorean philosophy was well suited for 
the purpose of mingling its doctrines with the fabulous 
narratives of the poet, as it consisted, in great part, 
of the doctrine of an endless series of transformations, 
its main features may be reduced to two general 
heads, the first of which was the doctrine of metam- 
psychosis, or continual transmigration of souls (as in 
rebirth) from one body to another. Pythagoras is 
supposed not to have originated this doctrine, but to 
have received it from the Egyptians, by whose priest- 
hood there is little doubt that it was originated. 

A native of India says : "We've been taught for 
ages after ages, and centuries after centuries, to turn 
our gaze inward toward the realms that are not those 
which are reached by the help of the physical senses. 
Great as the physical body may be, there is something 
greater within man, underneath the universe that is 
to be longed for and striven after." 



And Higher Light 139 

Plutocratic religions must give way for democracy 
as Jesus taught and practiced. The cycle of matter 
and that higher one of the spirit, admit of no release 
from law — here and hereafter. No agencies for God 
— to excuse, to help, to exonerate. The little verse of 
Bishop Doane may be cited : 

The parish priest of Austerity 

Climbed up in a high church steeple 
To be nearer God, that he might 

Hand down His word unto the people. 

So he daily wrote in sermon script 
What he thought was sent from heaven, 

And he dropped this down on the people's heads 
Two times one day in seven. 

In his age, God said, "Come down and die." 

And he cried from out the steeple : 
"Where are thou, Lord?" and the Lord replied, 

"Down here among my people." 

The human mind, as shown in progress of inven- 
tions, has no recourse but from imitation of nature. 
Our minds get the concepts only of earth (and what 
the light within prompts), so why not have a religion 
that will glorify the Original of all earth's glories? 
"This is a sinful world" is taught by priests, yet the 
Original of all is praised — the revilers of His works 
knowing no other world ! There are billions of crea- 
tures and numberless plants, unknown to us "of the 
home plant," yet some may be intelligent and inclined 
to see and appreciate any of these: this is religion look- 
ing backwards, and not seeing the all-absorbing beau- 
ties of the present. 

Education is far from that concept of reward in an- 
other world — a heaven of bliss and praise to God. 



140 Physical Life 

Prof. Sumner, deceased, of Yale University, once said : 

"The higher you go in social attainments, the 
greater will be the restraints upon you. The gait, the 
voice, the manner, the rough independence of one or- 
der of men is unbecoming in another. Education 
above all brings this responsibility. Discipline in man- 
ners and morals does not belong to the specific matter 
of education. The educated man must work by him- 
self without any overseer over him. He finds his com- 
pulsion in himself and it holds him to his task longer 
than any external compulsion. This responsibility to 
self we call honor, and it is one of the highest fruits 
of discipline when discipline, having wrought through 
intellect, has reached character. 

"It is well that we should remember that the re- 
ligious life looked for God in law and ritual, in the 
abnormal and unusual ; but for Jesus, as for every man 
who has earnestly sought to help his fellows, the ordi- 
nary and commonplace were enough. How the growth 
of the priest and the progress of ecclesiasticism all 
through the middle ages, overlaid and obscured Jesus 
— his spirit and His teaching — and the 'hungry sheep 
looked up and were not fed !' How slow man has been 
in learning that the kingdom of God is among you, 
even within you, in the common people of whom all 
other teachers have declared !" 

Further, says this writer : 

"The Pharisee in his tithing of 'mint, anis and cum- 
min,' in laying excessive stress on the trivialities of the 
law, on Sabbath keeping, on tithes and temple ritual, 
on the washing of pot and platter, shut himself out 
of all sharing in the fellowship and friendship of 



And Higher Light 141 

Jesus, for he utterly missed His spirit. In all that he 
supposed constituted righteousness, the Spiritual had 
no part. Absorbed as he was in the vexations and 
pettiness of trivialities he was but playing to himself a 
contemptible comedy of holiness." 

A Night of the Soul! From age to age selfishness 
has increased. We kill all harmless birds and animals 
for sport only ,or for food; robberies are on the in- 
crease ; even children, helplessly aged persons, pets and 
domestic animals, are cruelly treated. Lambs and 
monkey calves are led to the slaughter, or themselves 
are starved that the selfish humankind may get richer 
milk and cream. Physical nature will in course of 
events become rigid and cold as the earth loses by age 
— our moon already presents only one side to us. So 
the earth, in turn, will show only the one face to the 
sun, later to be swallowed up in that fiery furnace. 
Meantime, all the living creatures of earth will die, and 
be reborn on some globe as a new home, probably the 
next planet in our system behind the earth ,if habitable. 
There may we have joys, flowers and fruits, in fact, a 
second home for all ! 

This is of a greater evolution, indeed. 

We are learning more and more of the Spirit; hav- 
ing less and less of the fear of death — that is no 
monster at all. All will abide under and trust the 
Beneficent Creator at last. Death and birth are near 
alike. 

Half the congregations of so-called worshippers 
may have a certain belief in Beneficent Christ, yet so 
set in the crooked way that these have murder in their 
hearts if others will not cringe to a selfish opinion. 



142 Physical Life 

Rows upon rows the graves are found in Slander's 
fields! — So numerous that continuous graveyards 
stretch around the world, and then not hold those 
killed by cruel slanderers. Yes, in Slander's field ! 

Real education is not a common kind of culture, 
for business, war, etc. Matthew Arnold, in the Intro- 
duction of his essay, "Szveetness and Light, says : "In 
one of his speeches a short time ago, that fine speaker 
and famous Liberal, Mr. Bright, took occasion to have 
a fling at the friends and preachers of culture. 'People 
talk about what they call culture,' said he contemptu- 
ously, 'by which they mean a smattering of the two 
dead languages, of Greek and Latin.' It is well for 
Americans to remember that the cultured Englishman, 
Mr. Gladstone, was the first of the aristocrats who fa- 
vored in Parliament the side of slavery in our fight 
for the United States and freedom in 1861-5." We 
want no such culture. It was just such autocrats as 
Gladstone who financed that war for slavery, yet the 
scoundrels failed of their purpose to break up the 
United States. The same kultur we fought against in 
the World's War later. 

There is nothing in the universe stationary — nothing 
void of Heat. Evolution may refer to life as we 
know it. Matter cannot be "blessed" into animation of 
soul, nor can our bodies be mummified to preserve the 
mortal likeness — preserve from changes of time. 



A rose she was, most passing fair, 
That makes more sweet the summer air 

For one day only; 
A solitary cloud at noon, 
That, melting in the dome of June, 

Leaves the blue lonely: 



And Higher Light 143 

A bird at dawn that upward flies 
And falls from out the scarlet skies 

Of Eldorado; 
A murmuring shell upon the shore 
Swirled sudden down beneath the roar 

To realms of shadow; 

A sumptuous moth, in autumn hours, 
A-flutter o'er ephemeral flowers 

In vain endeavor ; 
A firefly in the fields of even, 
That lights a little space of heaven, 

Then fades forever. 

—Lloyd Mifflin. 

As I once told John Burroughs, my opinion was that 
the greatest, unpleasantest fall of man was when he 
fell from the trees, then in his arboreal stage of nature. 
He began then to kill and eat innocent creatures on 
the earth, descending to the low estate of a carnivore 
or buzzard. Keep going, going — so you get some- 
where. 

A chance for home gives the weakest (or wickedest) 
criminal some cheer, of the dreamy kind. Out of the 
depths, cries Evolution. It takes no "Revelations" to 
give your inmost thoughts something of that core of 
Being — your mind's eye pictures of HOME, if it was 
a happy one! The devout Catholic, with his "Hail, 
Mary," has conscious touch of home, here or here- 
after. 

It matters not what science may tell of matter and 
worlds. A single cell of the lowest life has a mag- 
netic cell to reach for its next neighbor, cell of an 
opposite polarity. This is the way of life here — Love 
and Home. The Sun of Righteousness ! We know 
throughout all history of divine influence — a light that 
but seldom lights upon sea or shore; the days not ac- 



144 Physical Life 

tinic, even, but known of those who "see in the dark." 
When the human spirit reaches near the Highest, be 
sure there will be no selfishness in such a Presence — 

Come back, come back across the flying foam, 
We hear faint, far-off voices call us Home; 
Come back, ye seem to say ; ye seek in vain : 
We went, we sought, and homeward turned again. 

Come back, come back ! 
And lighter far than ocean's flying foam, 
The heart's fond message hurries to its HOME! 

Students of the University of Michigan have begun 
a new and excellent life work in agriculture, that prom- 
ises much . There the young folks, studying under 
government supervision, are being paid for vocational 
training for the farm. Their courses stipulate. that a 
certain period be devoted to practical agriculture. Stu- 
dents are required to pay for the public lands on instal- 
ments, from a salary of $100 a month which each re- 
ceives. The men, some of whom begin work with 
families, are to be housed in large community bunga- 
lows, until separate houses will be built. There will 
be schoolhouses, stores, churches, recreation halls and 
grounds. 

The culture secured in our American schools it is 
hoped will eliminate much of ignorance, in every phase 
of life. We have now too much of childishness and 
selfishness. 

Aggravating foreign troubles now — and such with 
disease uncultivated catch readily in our republic — is 
near anarchy now in Russia, from misunderstanding 
of their prophet, Tolstoy. He, with ideas of culture 
such as Jesus', is conducing the boorish now in need of 
a government. 



And Higher Light 145 

We all have Hope ,that means Heaven, and from 
the present lookout one can visualize there the robes 
of the Very Reverends, preachers robed with right- 
eousness, the reformed murderer or thief, and those 
with robes cleverly made for the "getting there with 
both feet," who affirm they never die — but fly ! 

In a period of great unhappiness in youth, Goethe 
penned some odes (halbunsinn) that, now, 150 years 
later, read very like prophecy, regarding his Father- 
land. I copy here and there these lines: 

"In the distant world is waiting, 
In our arms thou'lt find thy prized, and love, 
too, when returning !" 

And now I've seen her, 

Alas ! how changed ! 
With cold demeanor 

And looks estranged, 
With ghostly tread, — 

All hope is fled, 
Yea, fled forever ! 

The lightnings quiver, 
Each palace falls ; 

The god-like halls 
Each joyous hour 

Of spirit power 
With Love's sweet day 

All fades away! 

Let us in a cunning wise 

Yon dull Christian priests surprise ! 
With the devil of their talk 

We'll those very priests confound. 
Come with prong, and come with fork, 

As from the smoke is freed the blaze, 
So let our faith burn bright! 
And if they crush our olden ways, 

Who e'er can crush Thy Light? 
Wilder yet the sounds are growing, 

See the arch-fiend comes all glowing. 



146 Physical Life 

Thou would'st rejoice to leave 

This hated land behind! 
Wert thou not chained to me 

With friendship's flowery chains. 
Brother, take thy brethren with thee, 

With thee to thy aged Fatherland. 

Down from the lofty, 
Rocky wall 

Streams the bright flood, 
Then spreadeth gently 
In cloudy billows 
O'er the smooth rock, 
And welcomed kindly, 
Veiling, on roars it, 
Softly murmuring, 
Toward the abyss. 

Spirit of man, 

Thou art like unto water! 

Fortune of man, 

Thou art like unto wind! 
* * * * 

All the remaining races so poor 

Of life-teeming Earth, 

In children so rich, wander and feed 

In vacant enjoyment, 

And midst the dark sorrow 

Of evanescent, restricted life — 

Bowed by the Yoke of Necessity! 

Father of Love — but one tone 

That to His ear may be pleasing, 

Oh ! then, quicken His heart ! 

Clear his cloud-enveloped eyes; 

Over the thousand fountains, 

Close by the thirsty one in the desert. 

As old as Plato or older was a fact — known, I sur- 
mise, through the Spirit ; Life not requiring space and 
time, and we find in our mortal existence, spiritually 
it comes to us without our knowledge here. By what 
I may term sympathetic assortment, nations and fami- 
lies associate when "time is no more." One who gov- 
erns all things, so is known not of men exactly, a prob- 
lem of race as well as nationality here with us. 



And Higher Light 147 

Says V. Kellogg in Yale Review, "The problem of 
Americanization of the American people involves a 
consideration of race as well as nationality — partly 
biological, partly educational. Anthropology is a sci- 
ence which has had great development in recent years 
because of the many finds of the relics of prehistoric 
man that have been made since the beginning of this 
century; so a new and much more precise knowledge 
of heredity has also been gained." 

Melting pots have no uses when we affirm, generally 
speaking, "God rules." Polarity in the character is a 
something to convince us man cannot govern ; we our- 
selves as Americans continue to kill or cure, in our 
physical times and conditions. Just as we learn on 
earth, — that except for polarization, that even in 
lake to cleanse us, as babes later are cleaned by us 
in the physical life, — cannot remake the soul. Other- 
wise we could be made as Adam, scripturally, "out of 
the dust of the earth," that a breathing of the "breath 
of life" touched. 

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, 
where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as 
time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. 
There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an ac- 
credited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, 
not a received tradition which does not threaten to 
dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the 
fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion 
to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for 
poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of 
illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emition 



148 Physical Life 

to the idea ; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of 
our religion today is its unconscious poetry. 

Let me be permitted to quote these words of my 
own, as uttering the thought which should, in my opin- 
ion, go with us and govern us in all our study of 
poetry. 

— Matthew Arnold. 



CONCLUSION 

I have yet much manuscript, but forbear to use it 
until such may be needed, explanatory to the theory 
of rebirth and new evolutions. 

Slowly our old earth may get the transforming in- 
genuity of man — to get away from the "Under World" 
(after robbing it), reaching for abode nearer the 
heavens. Airplanes, already very ingenious, will, after 
many mishaps to the inventors and users, — be used 
skyward; for, let us consider Nature Farther — how 
annually the clouds now keep up the millions of tons 
of water in wet seasons! More room at the top is 
an old saying. Keep up a lively courage, for you have 
friends — an Almighty Father; and Greatest of the 
Prophets, Jesus; have your twins within your soul, 
Conscience and Character, and that host of the "Do 
unto others as you wish to be done by," — others may 
be tricksters! 

W. T. 

A few words, gentle reader, and then I quit. We 
"two or three met together," as Jesus enjoined, have 
had life under discussion, just as Job of old and his 






And Higher Light 149 

friends. As at the dawn of creation, under the tree 
of life, the question Good and Evil comes uppermost. 
Let us confer, concern ourselves very little as to a place 
in heaven, but try to determine influences growing out 
of good and evil, that affect us and others. Eliminate 
the dead wood on the Tree, "cast it into the fire," as 
Jesus advised, and act as good husbandmen for plant- 
ing — not in stony places. Let there be care to stop 
the irrigating wastes in our Garden of Eden. Curb 
laziness and languor in the good work for the world, 
and promote culture. 

In a word, let us have Peace and Plenty — if possi- 
ble, in this Old Home , earth ,as appointed (thus far 
on the Path of Life), so we can continue God's plan in 
our Everlasting World of the Spirit. 

THE END 



To the Reader; 

"Physical Life and Higher Light" has been 
compiled by the author, Wm. Taylor, not with 
the idea of financial gain, but to reach a class of 
people who have an intelligent appreciation of 
new educational ideas. The price, therefore, 
has been put at the lowest point consistent with 
the actual cost of the printing, binding and 
mailing. 

$1.40 by money order or cash will bring 
this book to you, postpaid. 

Address: 

California Printing Company, 
1134547 Stimson Bldg., 
Dept. 3 Los Angeles, California 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Sept. 2004 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



